SEO Dabbling

Here we explain what we at Topdog call SEO dabbling. It’s a scenario we come across far too often, but the good news is that it can be fixed.

What Is SEO Dabbling?

Picture someone who takes a quick look at the site’s code, tweaks the title tags and meta descriptions, and writes dull ones at that. They add some cheap, pointless copy to their online shop’s category pages, or publish an article that barely answers the question it targets. Sometimes an SEO agency even talks them into using links from its own SEO network. Then they assume it will work. Or want it to. Or at least hope it will.

Far too often, this stripped-down approach leaves people disappointed. Some even write SEO off as a channel altogether. That’s a mistake, given that people run 50 to 70 million searches every day.

Why Does SEO Dabbling Happen?

Our thinking is different, and it starts with how we define SEO. For us, SEO is four things:

• Content, because Google is a text search engine
• Technical SEO in the broadest sense
• User experience, because the answer you deliver has to be nicely packaged
• Backlinks to your site

As you can see, SEO is a complex discipline. In some companies, separate departments even own different parts of it, and someone has to pull it all together. The antidote to SEO dabbling, and the route to far greater SEO success, is to plan your search engine optimization properly. Build a plan for all four areas. It should spell out:

• What you’ll do
• When you’ll do it
• How you’ll do it
• Who will do it

You’ll also need clear goals, a budget, a cost/benefit analysis and, in some cases, a risk assessment. Work from a plan like this instead of dabbling and your results will look completely different. You’ll reach the coveted top three positions, where 80 to 90 per cent of the value lies.

So stop dabbling and build the plan instead. And if you can’t put it together on your own, we can help.

Keeping the user experience front and centre matters more and more if you want to rank well. For a good example, see our article on copy for e-commerce category pages.