Of all the new skills marketers have been asked to master in the digital age, one of the most intimidating is SEO. Organizations know what it is and they know they should be doing it, but the ever-changing algorithms and techniques often strike them as foreign and incomprehensible.
As a result, many skip it altogether – a 2014 Adobe survey showed 49 percent of marketers use intuition rather than data to spend their marketing budget. That’s a shame, because there’s no doubt that SEO can be effective. According to a study from the National Retail Federation, search marketing, including SEO, was 2014’s biggest source of new customers for 85 percent of online retailers.
The flip side of that, of course, is that because SEO is so valuable, the people who do it well tend to be expensive or even lack transparency. It’s not a skill that can be mastered with one YouTube tutorial; expert SEO demands smart strategies around keywords, meta tags, indexing issues and penalty recovery…
SEO: You Can’t Game Google. Here’s What to Focus on Instead.
