Not just impressive numbers, but figures that have massively increased over the past decade. Given consumer and business web habits as they are today, all indications suggest this acceleration will continue.
SEO is neither dead nor dying – it is more important than it has ever been.
Shifting Tactics to SEO Success
That said, what has changed radically over the years is the approach necessary to succeed with SEO. Stuffing content with keywords, purchasing backlinks, loading websites with invisible content and so on – all guaranteed to work against you in 2021.
Today, it is all about the organic approach to SEO. Search engine sophistication has reached a point where the value to the reader of all web content crawled can now be analysed from a near-human-level perspective.
Search engines exist to provide web users with quality recommendations based on their requests, so it simply makes sense that the content they crawl is analysed from the perspective of a human being.
As a result, the key to successful SEO in 2021 lies primarily in two things – quality content and the overall user experience. There is no longer any room for ‘forcing’ SEO favour or faking your way to the top of the rankings. Unless you provide your target audience with exactly what they want, you will not be taken seriously by any of the major search engines.
A Case of Cultivating Trust and Loyalty
Getting people on to your pages in the first place is important, but there is also a cyclical aspect to SEO that needs to be factored in. Roughly translated, you need to present yourself as credible, trustworthy and authoritative for the major search engines like Google to promote you. The better your website is performing and the more visitors you attract that keep coming back for more, the easier it becomes to climb the rankings.
It’s the classic case of investing just as heavily in your existing customers as those you would like to win over for the first time. Something that is guaranteed to benefit your bottom line and your SEO performance.
The Paradox of Paid Search Ads
On a final note, feel free to invest in paid search ads if you like, but don’t expect them to work miracles. Increasingly, Google is pushing the organic results further down the page to make room for its own paid ads at the top.
Which is all well and good, aside from the fact that research suggests the overwhelming majority of people instinctively skip past these paid ads anyway.
There are no shortcuts to SEO and nor can you ‘buy’ your way to overnight fame and fortune. But if you are willing to invest the necessary time and effort in your strategy, you have every chance of generating a major return on your investment.
