When I started providing the SEO services to the businesses in the 90s, the SEO was not a popular concept, and not many business owners who have a website even knew what it was. I usually needed to start explaining what the SEO was, and how the businesses could benefit from the SEO. The SEO was considered as a part of IT/Web design work back then, now it seems to be moved to the Marketing department. It is really nice to see how the SEO has been viewed as one of the most important aspects of successful website/online businesses in recent years. More and more companies are integrating the SEO as a part of their overall website process and the marketing channels. On the other hand, there are many SEO professionals who have great knowledge of SEO, but don’t seem to be able to adopt the business needs.

SEO Strategy Should Be Designed To Support The Business Goals

As many of you understand, higher organic rankings and larger organic traffic are not the SEO goals, and definitely not the business goals. Good SEO strategy is focused on the quality traffic that brings more conversions. The better SEO strategy is aligned with the business goals by understanding the focus areas. Fixing an SEO problem A is good, but if that doesn’t impact on the end results, that SEO project is a failure to the company.

Another trend I see more and more with the SEO professionals is that they are rigidly fixed on the best practices.  If they are willing to understand how the client’s organization is structured, and how the action items are prioritized, you can provide better recommendations that clients can actually implement. It may be slower than you’d like, but they will move the needle.

In 2018, the SEO is no longer a niche tech work as once viewed. It requires us to have a good understanding of products, marketing, audience targeting, content writing, data analysis, project management, and more in addition to the SEO skills. Remote work is great, as I do, too, but having a close communication with clients is a key to understand the reasons why they are where they are with the SEO challenges and to provide the effective solutions.