Deliver what you promise

It completely depends on what you are trying to do with your website. Who do you want to attract to your site and why? If your goal is to get as many visits as possible to a worthless site to earn money on banner ads from third parties, then yes these developments are going to be hard on business.

However, if your publish good content, or sell a good product that people are searching for; if you have something people want to find in Google, then this is actually a good development. Panda, Penguin and every other action Google is taking is directed to delivering the best possible user experience, meaning that whenever your site contains what people are searching for, then Google will go out of its way to get those people there. Of course you would like to get more visitors than your competitor who sells the same product, but times have changed. You can no longer trick people into visiting your site instead of your competitors (with actions like link building). You have to respect your customers and deliver a better customer service than your competitor to attract people, and one way is to deliver the specific content they are interested in.

Thus SEO still means you need to optimize pages to improve your rank in Google, but that will only work if you have earned that rank by delivering the right content; by delivering a great service to your customers. You will still be building links towards your site, but only by earning those links, because a third party believes your site is worth it, not because you have paid for it.

How to measure if your SEO works?

However, you will still have to report the results of your SEO efforts to your superiors or your clients. And if 40% of these results, or more in the future, are not shown, then how can you report you were successful?

With a good site each web page you create will have a main objective; a main topic. This means you can have only so many keywords related to each single page. Thus, if a certain page gets more organic search visitors that means its keyword(s) are obviously doing better. The page owner is after all more interested in the amount of visitors to the page than in the success of the keyword itself.

In the end it is all about delivering a better customer service. Happy clients are returning clients and will more likely buy something from you.

Do you agree with my views above, or do you see things completely different?

Social media

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

YouTube

Old Spice: a great social media campaign that fizzled out
Old Spice managed to turn “your grandfather’s” kind of product into a really sexy brand, but instead of nurturing and growing the great relationships they created with their followers, they abandoned them....