As an SEO agency in beautiful Bend, Oregon, and Santa Barbara, CA, who along with brand positioning, brand identity and digital marketing, provides SEO services for clients from Bend to the middle east, I thought I’d take a moment and address this one:

What is SEO truly, and what is it not?

SEO is: A fundamental piece of your online marketing and branding.
SEO is not: A one-time activity.
No matter what an SEO agency or bundled SEO + web design company tells you, a one and done, whirl and twirl, whatever you want to call it, to your website will never get you where you want to be online.
While yes, having the correct on and offsite elements in place will provide a humungous push into the online world, and may be reasonably effective with your slower-to-move competitors, it’s a moving target. Sorry to break it to you. The good news is that with a little effort and foresight, it’s an obtainable one. So, let’s clarify. You will need to do more than “do SEO” to your website once and call it done. You might compare it to every other marketing task in your business – they are all ongoing. It’s the same with SEO. You will want to watch it, change it, bootstrap into it and enhance and adjust it accordingly.

A few reasons why one time of doing anything on your website, especially your SEO, should be rethought:

• First – You will want to watch your competitors including how they’ve positioned and repositioned themselves. Your competitors make changes, improve their websites and may adjust their offering on a regular basis.
• Second – Search engines are constantly changing approaches and algorithms to meet the evolving needs of search, and the styles of people doing the searching. New approaches are implemented and others are refined sometimes overnight.
• Third – The style and language people use to search change. This is based on time, psychographics, and general evolution of the web. For example, some people search in questions, some search in long tail, some in short tail, it all depends, and the search engines are always evolving to accommodate this. You can’t really outsmart it, but what you can do is analyze the data and stay on top of it.
• Fourth – The web is ever changing. Nothing sits still any longer. So in this content-driven world, situational and informational needs will be different from one day to the next

It’s relatively simple if you think of SEO in terms of something done to make search engines function more efficiently to provide better and more relevant results. That’s why you need SEO. For us as companies, we must have the experience in place so that when our customers find our brands, there’s a good fit. That takes looking at it as a branding element and piece of your online marketing that is ongoing and always evolving.

Have fun out there, and let us know if you need help.
Christina, The Savy Agency