Practically every person who starts a local business, makes modest progress for a while, and then thinks “Hey, I should create a website!” comes up against a tough challenge. Whatever product or service that young business sells, there are already a lot of other websites on the Internet already selling it, and that means that those competitors already have a strong foothold in the organic search results. Once the new website owner starts looking into organic SEO services, he comes up against warnings that search engine optimization is a challenging, specialized, long-term activity, and trying to do it “the easy way” will lead to penalties and consistently poor rankings on the search results pages.
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While the initial reaction of a person like this will probably be discouragement, in fact you should be happy that organic SEO is so difficult! Here are the reasons why that’s a good thing for you and your business.
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Google Has Gotten Smarter
In the early days of the Internet search engine, a person like our hypothetical small business owner could simply put a lot of keywords on his new website, and before long, his site would be ranking quite well on page one of the search results for those keywords. But for each legitimate business owner that was trying to get high-quality products in front of interested customers, there were many scammers who were doing the same thing just to attract large numbers of visitors and then show them unwanted advertising content.
Fortunately, Google and the other search engines have become smarter now, and while you can’t quickly vault your website to the front of the line any more, the good news is that neither can all the scammers that would immediately vault past you.
Searchers Are More Engaged
By cracking down on shortcut tactics, Google has made it more likely that the websites that do show up on the first page of search results are truly high-quality, informative sources that hold value for visitors. Because search engine users are well aware of that, they trust Google and continue to use it as their preferred information-gathering tool. If Google were to slack off and let website designers get away with deceptive SEO methods, search engine users would catch on and stop trusting Google as much. That, in turn, would hurt the companies that use guaranteed organic SEO services, as there would be fewer potential customers searching for their services online.
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Quality is Worth More
Over the past decade or so, there has been a huge shift in the field of organic SEO from a focus on keywords and links to a focus on overall quality of the website. That shift has come as engineers have learned how to make Google’s search ranking algorithm accurately identify content that human visitors will find valuable. Rather than blindly counting the number of times a certain phrase appears on the page, Google’s modern algorithm assesses a network of related keywords, quality of writing, and the presence of other elements like video and images as well as backlinks and keyword density.
In fact, Google goes even further in identifying whether visitors will find a web page useful—it actually measures how visitors interact with that page over time and modifies its ranking of that page in the search results accordingly. This is the biggest reason why web design and organic SEO services should be closely linked; a website built with the visitor experience in mind will earn longer stay times and more interaction, which in turn will have a fantastic effect on the website’s rankings in future Google searches.
It’s like we tell our customers all the time: if an SEO provider is constantly talking about what tactics they can use to push your website to the top of the rankings, there’s something important missing. Instead, there should be a strong focus on making your website as great and as useful to real human beings as possible. With that foundation, the other tried-and-true SEO practices that Google recognizes as valid will simply add to your website’s success and get it in front of more visitors.
