SEO is a skill like any other. Meaning, there are two aspects: the technical side, and the mindset side.
Think of it like playing the piano. First, you have the technical side… that’s learning how to make your hands move quickly up and down the keyboard. But the technical side is useless without the musical mindset – what actually allows you to play beautiful music.
This is just like SEO. You can know everything there is to know about SEO. If you don’t have the SEO mindset though, all you’ll have is a bag full of techniques.
In today’s article, we’ll be exploring four crucial mindsets for all SEO’s.
Mindset #1: SEO is a PART of Your Business
This is incredibly important. Too often, people view SEO as “just another marketing strategy”. The reality is, Google’s set up an algorithm that awards websites that create true value in their market.
What does this mean? It means the better your business is, the better your site’s rankings will be.
Therefore, your mindset from the very beginning must be to improve your site for your visitor’s eyes. You NEED to be providing value at every opportunity. This way, when people visit your site, they’ll stick around, and come back to it frequently. Additionally, they’ll link to it and share your posts/content on social networks.
Google takes all this into account and will rank your site based on the level of value it’s providing.
Don’t believe me? Look at what’s happened to “thin” sites with the past few Google updates. It doesn’t pay to focus on SEO instead of your site. Instead, focus on your site, your BUSINESS, and the rankings will come naturally. Provide value first, think SEO second.
Mindset #2: SEO is a Long-Term Strategy
I remember when I was first getting into SEO. It sounded awesome. I could flood buying traffic to any website I could think of making. Awesome!
But then I actually started doing SEO. And I realized I wasn’t getting results. So I did what everyone else was doing at the time – kickstarted my link-building efforts. I got as many links as quickly as I possibly could.
Suddenly, my sites started rising in the rankings! Awesome. Until it wasn’t. One day, Google released an update. And just like that, my site vanished from the SERPs, never to recover.
SEO works like this: you can either front-load your SEO efforts and get quick, short-term rankings, or you can do things the right way and get LONG-TERM results that take anywhere from six months to a year to kick in.
Trust me… the only viable option is the long route. That’s because if you put in the time it takes to create a valuable website, Google will want to have you ranking for as long as possible. This is the only way SEO is “passive”. You need to do a LOT of work upfront, create a lot of value, and get ranking naturally. This way, Google has no reason to drop your site’s rankings.
Mindset #3: SEO Starts from the Beginning
Remember – SEO goes hand-in-hand with your business. This means when you first start a website, you need to be factoring SEO into the equation. SEO works best if you start with it from the very beginning.
This means optimizing every page of your site as you create it. And creating a site structure that allows the Google bots to see everything quickly and easily.
If you start SEO right when you begin a website, you can make sure everything is 100% optimized before you even begin. This way, as you focus on creating value, as you get natural links and social shares, they’ll have exponentially more benefits than had you started with a non-optimized website.
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