I am writing this post at the risk of condemnation from both clients and industry peers, to offer some perspective on the SEO game. The inspiration behind this post is the habit we can get into, of “watched potting” our search engine ranking positions (SERPs), while holding unnecessary expectations and creating unnecessary anxiety. As the saying goes – “a watched pot never boils”.

SEO is NOT really about your Google ranking.  We tend to forget that quite often. SEO is actually about slowly building a predictable steam of targeted traffic to your website, through the search engines. So you should not really be measuring the success of SEO by rechecking your Google places every week, day, hour (you don’t do you…? Oh dear) – rather you should measure the success of your SEO by viewing your traffic statistics in Google Analytics. (and Google Webmaster Tools)

SEO is like all good marketing too. Its not typically an instant success, rather a gradual build of work, which increases the awareness and authority of your brand. So you should not look for big spikes in your organic traffic, rather a slow build. A gradually building level of SEO organic traffic really is the best outcome for any SEO campaign.

So, by changing your perspective about what SEO really is about, (if you missed the point of the article – its traffic) you may also be able to shift your perspective about how to market your entire website. In doing so, you may lose your dependency (to the point of desperation?) on Google to get people to your website. IE. If SEO is just about getting people to your website, we all know that there are many other ways to achieve this also. SEO is not the only way to get your website in-front of people.

With that in mind – and with the change of plan putting your SEO campaign on the slow-build, (rather than rocket) what else can you do to build traffic to your website and business profiles? Here are some ideas to consider:

• Pay per click advertising
• Get active in social media
• Run an advertising campaign on a social media platform
• Create a targeted and optimised YouTube video
• Have an offer and call to action on your business cards
• Create an email database and run an email marketing campaign
• Write some articles for the big ezines

There are so many opportunities out there to put your website in front of people, and the real interesting thing is often when you do these other things, it actually helps your SEO also.