7 to 10 years ago, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was still a nebulous and technical area of expertise that most marketers relied on coding professionals to handle. A constant monitoring of best practices was necessary, sparking changes within the HTML of a website to match ever-changing theories of how to manipulate your rankings on the search engines. Marketers were required to understand the general purpose of SEO and some basic questions that were necessary to be answered for proper strategy development, but few really understood how it all worked.

Today, the climate is much different. Google and Bing are telling us and demonstrating that achieving higher “rankings” in search engine results is more and more about content and experience. Sure, the technical aspects of your website must be in place, but ongoing improvement of your ranking for specific keywords depends on what kind of experience a visitor to your site has when they are looking for specific information. Gone are the days of packing multiple occurrences of keyword strings (like ‘best pizza in Seattle’) into your text, with the sole purpose of manipulating your ranking within the Google results when someone searches “best pizza in seattle”.

Now, the algorithms, which change up to 500 times per year, are designed to ensure a visitor is finding and engaging with the information they find on a given search result. It is all about building a quality experience for the user of the search engine. So, it makes it all the more important that the content of your website answers a visitor’s questions, causes them to read and engage with the content, and satiates their thirst for information. There are still technical aspects of SEO that must be in place to ensure speed and accuracy for index
ing and organizing the information for search engine crawlers, so SEO experts are still needed. Writing and user-experience optimization, though, are now equally important. You must also monitor site-loading speeds, mobile-friendly formatting, and make sure the content you provide is unique (including images).

A marketing consultant for your small business should recommend at least an occasional optimization of the technical “backend” SEO strategy on your site, but even more importantly, they should provide engaging content and an improved user experience on the front-end of your site. There are several ways this can be accomplished, based on your industry, site format, and your company’s niche. This also means you should choose a marketing consultant that understands your business and your customers’ mindset when they are looking for your products and services.