As the title explains, this piece is about the dangerous myth of the SEO GURU. Are there people sufficiently knowledgeable to be described as an SEO GURU? Of course, they are. Sometimes the best answer to your problem is indeed to engage the services of such an SEO Guru and have him/her to take a fresh look and suggest different approaches or solutions to the issues you have encountered.
This article was never intended to debunk the idea of an SEO guru is to suggest that SEO Gurus are in some way a bad thing. The point I am at pains to make is that SEO is 90% sweat and a maximum of 10% brilliance. In -act when brilliance is called for it is often because basic practices and procedures have been neglected for one reason or another. The most common exception to this is when bad actors carry out negative SEO attacks against your site.
If you find yourself doubting whether you have been doing things right and believe me this is a very common feeling and always without fail resulting from poor performance an din particular a scarcity of web customers or maybe even visitors, then the best approach is to take a little time out and then star again as though you were me and you had just been called in to find out what is wrong and find a solution.
As a sort of SEO Guru, though I wouldn’t encourage use if that term, I would ask a real GURU, my man Martin, to run a technical review, covering every aspect of the site and looking form the viewpoint of a search engine bot. This approach most effectively tells you what needs to be in place and what is missing in terms of ranking each page highly. It is a great staring point, but it is only relevant when you have an objective discussion about what your goals are for the site and whether they are realistic and what resources you do or do not have available to you.
Equipped with all of this knowledge, my approach would then be to list the things I can realistically do that will significantly move the needle and create a timeline with dependencies for getting this done and then reviewing the situation again.
Putting together a revised strategy and plan follows an identical process to that of forming a strategy as dealt with in this piece. If you get time to read that piece and I do recommend it, you will notice that the last section places emphasis on defining the expected outcomes and putting in place a decent measurement strategy. It’s very important to align your goals very closely with the measurement strategy. For example, if you are complaining about no sales, then clearly your goal is sales and that is ultimately how you will judge this new SEO Guru and therefore it is what you should measure. You will probably also want to measure visitors and a lot of other things as important building blocks, but they are not the ultimate definition of success and failure, Only sales and revenue can fit that bill
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