The Google Dance

It’s Only the Google Dance

I’m tired of the Google dance. It’s like the end of the Freshmen dance when all the cool kids have gone off with their dates and the rest of us are left milling around, looking awkwardly at each other.

It’s not that I’m blaming Google. I get that Google is trying to get rid of all the link schemes, spam and SEO strategies that were giving people an advantage. I did like things much better a year ago when it was much easier to manipulate the search engines, but Google is just trying to level the playing field. The only problem is that it’s not really happening that way.

Writing High Quality Content

Are you a great writer? I know I’m not. In 2015, as a business broker, I first discovered what a blog was, and I was told to write content to get found in the search engines. After writing about 10 articles about how to buy or sell a business, I was done.  I found a great book on SEO Search EngineOptimization: An Hour a Day and was able to get my site ranking by following the step-by-step methods. Later on, working as a business broker, I listed a business for sale that was an online referral website for attorneys.  Looking at how that guy ran his online service gave me a chance to peek behind the curtain of Indian outsourcing. Ironically, that is what really catapulted me into my SEO career.

The Google Dance

SEO Methods

I started picking up clients around the brokerage by word of mouth once they saw how I got my own site and the brokerage to the top of Google. Having a team in India doing all your backlinking through blog commenting and forum posting almost seemed like I wasn’t earning my own money. Along the way, I picked up ebooks, joined warrior forum, created amazon affiliate sites and learned all I could about doing multiple methods of SEO. I was earning my money with keyword research, on-page optimization, article spinning, article syndication and blog networks while my team in India did the grunt work of manually creating comments and forum posts. On occasion, I would buy some links through software, but very cautiously because I knew this was totally sketchy. Of course, the teams in India will always tell you their methods are strictly “white hat” because the backlinks are made manually. Well, we all know that’s not legit — just read Google’s definition of Link Building Schemes. Basically, anything you do to manipulate the search engines is considered a link building scheme.

SEO Problems

Most of the old tricks no longer work. Times have changed and all those things that used to benefit your ranking can now harm it. Even if you think you’ve found a good trick, you can be sure it won’t last. Almost all sites are now losing ground in the rankings – sometimes as much as 50 to 80 percent or more. When you get those emails from India saying your site has suffered from a Google Panda and Penguin update, they didn’t have to look at your site to let you know. The SEO problem is not isolated and is wide spread. You may never see the traffic you once saw without paying Google.

In the past, we could throw in some additional keyword anchor text and recover when keywords were slipping in the rankings. Now, that action could make matters worse and hiring a team out of India to create links will definitely make things worse. The teams in India are still doing things the old way. It has taken them a little while to catch on that they had to change their email approach and mention how they are doing things since Panda and Penguin. I’ve been getting more emails from India lately — no doubt because they’ve lost work since Google’s algorithm updates. Even though their spin on the emails may look more enticing, when you check to see what they’re doing, it’s the same old stuff that no longer works. The fact is that most of what these companies do can hurt you, so it’s better if the emails end up in the spam folder with the Nigerian banking schemes. Some companies have stopped doing search engine optimization completely, and for good reason.

Solution to Online Marketing

Money is one solution to online marketing today. Imagine building a beautiful website with no way of attracting traffic. How much money would you spend on a site that no one can find? You have a business to run and probably don’t have the time to stay current on internet marketing. You need to be able to have someone write high quality, engaging content. You need to be able to pay someone to set up your meta tags and do on-page optimization. You need someone to share that content through social networking. You may even want to pay Google using their PPC (pay per click) AdWords Campaign or Facebooks advertising. It’s like you have to hire an entire staff of people just to run your website.

If you don’t have piles of money, good luck having any success in today’s world of online marketing. It really does come down to money, and the more you’re willing to spend on your online marketing budget, the more likely you’ll accomplish something — if you have the right team. Don’t try to get your online marketing campaign done as cheap as possible. You can get some good work done in multiple countries, but do not put your entire marketing campaign in their hands. You’ll need someone to manage them who can constantly stay on top of what’s happening. By the way, I should not be singling out India because it’s true of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Pakistan or any country you might use for outsourcing. Many of us in the industry outsource, but we only give specific tasks that we can monitor. If you want quality work, you have to pay accordingly.

Online Marketing for Your Business

You can no longer depend on one form of online marketing for your business. It’s no longer a matter of doing some SEO and getting a page ranked. The old way of doing SEO, which consisted of doing some keyword research and doing backlinks to get a page ranked, is dead. Online marketers have to learn all the other elements of online marketing to have any chance of long-term business success.

As an online marketer for businesses, it’s important to be able to help a business with all the following to be successful:

• website structure
• sales funnel
• conversion tracking
• meta tags
• title tags h1, h2, h3
• internal links
• valuable content
• authorship
• on-page optimization
• blogging
• mobile responsive
• analytics
• webmaster tools
• email marketing
• facebook
• twitter
• linkedIn
• google+
• google+ local
• pinterest
• youtube
• referal sites
• links
• reviews
• testimonials
• pay per click advertising
• facebook paid advertising
• bing adverstising
• yahoo advertising
• remarketing

Final Thoughts

I still hear from SEO companies that “it’s only the Google dance.” The Google dance is over and most SEO professionals know it. We are no longer looking for the next way to trick the search engines. We know it’s time to adapt and follow the Google rules. Those of us in this for the long haul are always training and expanding our knowledge base. Many of us have expanded into paid advertising and social media. I don’t think it’s fair to the little guy who doesn’t have a blog on his site, can’t write well or doesn’t have the resources to hire someone – but the dance is over, and it’s time to follow the right steps of your Google partner. If you’re a great writer you might dance to the top, as long as you’re doing everything else correctly. Even if you get your site ranked, it does not guarantee your success, and you’ll probably need professional help.