I’ve recently begun spending more time in SEO forums as I believe it’s necessary to stay abreast of the latest developments in the field. I first started doing SEO 17 years ago, back in 2005. And like many SEOs, back then, I wanted to know the latest strategies for getting to the top of Google. At the time it involved something called PageRank, a now extinct model of determining the value of a web page. That model has now been replaced by the Domain Authority and Page Authority model, which is still used today.
At the time, there was a fad of building word cloud sites, that offered absolutely zero value to the Internet and simply existed to horde PageRank and sell it on. I was late to the party and had just built one of these sites when Google overhauled their algorithm and PageRank became extinct. My efforts were all for nothing. That was the first and last time I tried to exploit Google’s shortcomings.
Today and for the last 16 years, my approach, and our approach as an SEO agency, is quite different:
This is key. In fact, the rest of our approach is derived from this immutable fact.
SEO is a long term market positioning and visibility strategy. Long term. And to hire an agency to help you position yourself in a way that will benefit your business is expensive. You’re looking at spending a minimum of 5 figures over six months. After all that, you want the results to last, right? You don’t want to lose your rankings after a few short months. And that is exactly what could happen if your SEO company tries to game Google.
Too many SEO agencies try to game Google. I see their people in forums talking about “what’s working now”. At Smart & Slick we are not interested in the latest techniques and strategies that are working now. That’s because we focus on things that will always work.
You’re probably wondering how we think we can know what will always work. Great question. Here’s how:
Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Let’s think about what that means for a moment. That means Google wants the end user to find whatever they were looking for. Google wants their end user to get what they want. If the user is looking to buy something, Google wants them to find a product to buy. If the end user just wanted information, Google wants their user to find that information.
And despite being hands down the most advanced search engine in the world, Google still hasn’t achieved this perfectly. Perhaps it never will. But one thing I can say for sure is it will continue to improve. So it pays dividends as an SEO agency to keep that in mind and keep our goal in line with theirs: to provide to the Internet the most relevant web page for the search result we’re trying to rank for. If we do that, Google will help us because we are helping Google.
This is the distinction between our approach and that of many SEO agencies. Any agency interested in “what’s working now” and “how to rank after the latest Google core update” is missing the big picture. That kind of short termist thinking will never prevail in the long run.
They’re definitely not working with Google’s end goal in mind. They’re ultimately trying to exploit a loophole in whatever Google’s current algorithm is. In other words, they are trying to, in a sense, get the better of Google. This is a hopelessly ridiculous stance to take because Google is an extremely clever technology and all loopholes are ultimately temporary. Any that exist today, will not exist at some point in the future. That is why the “what’s working now” agencies will never get long term consistent rankings and will always be chasing their tails after an update.
Meanwhile, we work WITH Google, rather than trying to exploit loopholes.
While other SEO agencies scrap around following an update of Google’s algorithm, we rarely see any major fall in rankings. Our clients continue to experience long term consistent search engine rankings.
If you’d like us to rank your website and help more customers find you, talk to us today.
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