For the last decade or so SEO has been the backbone of a lot of new businesses. Scour the search engine results pages for any term and you’ll most likely come across countless optimised pages from companies who are looking to generate as much business as possible through online means.
Over the last few years things have altered somewhat though and traditional SEO is no longer the powerhouse it used to be. Of course, it still plays a massive role for a lot of companies, but the emergence of social media and other avenues means that things have changed somewhat. When you consider the costs involved in optimising a website, it’s really no surprise to see that a lot of new companies have decided not to bother in outsourcing a specialist SEO provider.
However, while less emphasis might be placed on traditional SEO techniques, if you can focus on other issues a lot of your rankings will take care of themselves. While the title of this post indicates that ignoring traditional SEO might be an option, that’s not truly the case and a lot of companies are looking to influence it from an indirect perspective. We’ll now look at several ways you can do this…
Social Media
Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or Google+, if you can build an online brand for your business you will most likely boost your search engine rankings. There is constant speculation that Google is going to consider social media metrics, meaning that if you can get yours in order from the start you may stand a good chance of satisfying one of the ranking requirements in the future.
As well as the above, you will create opportunities for backlinks. Whether it’s via your business attracting attention from similar enterprises, or a special offer capturing eager users, social media will provide the opportunity to build relationships that should ultimately transpire to backlinks.
All of the above means that as well as building your social brand that should help you keep existing customers, social media should also help you build links and subsequently boost your rankings.
Offline Marketing
Some will call it dated, others will appreciate that offline marketing does exist and you should use it to your advantage wherever possible. A detailed breakdown of all of the offline methods and techniques is beyond the scope of this article, but the basic idea is to get your brand out to other local businesses and local publications as much as you can.
For example, if you were to arrange an interview with your local newspaper, this would most likely result in the piece appearing on their website. A backlink would subsequently be created, while there’s every chance that the quotes will be reused on other sites to generate even more backlinks. Therefore, consider every offline marketing method and carefully think if there are any ways to creatively net a backlink out of it.
Local SEO
While the focus of this article is to highlight the potential of specifically avoiding traditional SEO techniques and allowing matters to take care of themselves, local SEO is a completely different issue. This has progressed phenomenally over the past couple of years and by merely registering yourself as a business with Google, your company has every chance of being included in the top selection of local search results for specific terms. For example, if you were a Suffolk marketing company who was registered as a business with Google, you would automatically be considered for the local positions for any marketing phrase related to Suffolk.
Unfortunately, it’s seldom as easy as that and a little SEO is usually required to net the top spots. However, by simply registering yourself as a business you will most likely catch the eye of some firms and even if you only get added to a niche directory for your troubles, it’s still a backlink that didn’t arise through an expensive and traditional SEO service.