Top Reasons why Dwelling Over SEO Can Hurt Your Business

There’s no doubt that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. Without it, it’s almost impossible to remain competitive online, especially in saturated industries. Despite its importance, spending too much time worrying about SEO can actually hurt your business. Below, you will discover some of the most important reasons why.

Google Doesn’t Care about Companies

All too often, marketing teams get caught up in the idea of becoming Google’s “favorite”. What many people fail to realize is that Google doesn’t care about individual companies; it cares about the end user. In fact, every single algorithm is in place to ensure that the end user – the person typing into the search bar on their mobile phone or computer – has the best possible experience with the search engine. For this reason, don’t dwell on perfecting your SEO. Rather, focus on making sure your website gives the user the best possible experience.

Content is Still King

Another important consideration is the quality of the content on your website. You can have the perfect keywords at just the right density with just the right number of quality links, but if that content is poorly written, no amount of marketing money spent on getting that content out into the world will matter. Instead of spending all your time focused on the fine details of SEO, spend some of it creating high-quality content that just so happens to be organically optimized.

Black Hatting the System is No Longer an Option

With every passing update to its algorithms, Google gets smarter. Once upon a time, all you needed was the right keyword or phrase in the right place to climb the search results rankings. These days, though, black hat techniques like stuffing keywords into irrelevant content just to get clicks won’t work. In fact, Google is now so smart that its algorithms can penalize you for these tactics. It’s better to focus your time on high-quality organic website content that serves the user’s needs.

Your Money is Important Elsewhere

If you’re spending a huge chunk of your marketing money on SEO, you are doing your company a disservice, and there are several reasons for this. Instead of dumping most of your marketing budget into SEO, consider putting money into the following areas:

• Quality content creation. Hire a blogger or website content creator who has experience and understands your industry.
• Develop helpful tools for your website. If you sell a lot of products or offer a ton of information, spend some money on developing and implementing an internal search function. It’ll decrease your bounce rate and likely increase traffic.
• Create a social media following. Take some of the money you were spending on SEO and buy some ads on Facebook and other social media sites, instead. A good following is an important part of brand recognition, and that’s money well spent.

These are just a few examples of the ways in which focusing on SEO can hurt your business. Not only does it take money and effort away from other marketing efforts that may serve your company better, but it also has less of an impact on your overall search results rank than you might think. As the years go by, and as Google collects more and more data, it will fine-tune its algorithms in such a way that your site’s usefulness will further trump SEO, and you will need to be prepared.