SEOToday, I’m going to share with you something that few SEO professionals share with any of their customers. Too many SEO professionals want to pretend that they can work miracles and they have all the answers. Or they make it sound like they have some kind of secret in. Here’s the real deal – 4 realities of SEO that you need to know:

Good SEO Can’t Make Up for Junk Content or Products

Yes, we can help you get to the top of the rankings with SEO. However, ultimately, making the sale or not is up to you, not us. Here’s a great example: I’m a diabetic and I recently read about a store which claims to specialize in foods for diabetics and celiac disease sufferers. I went down there the other day, all excited hoping to find some exotic foods I usually have to order online.
Getting me to get there was just like SEO – I learned about them and went to look. However, making the sale was the part of the job they failed miserably at. It turned out they had two aisles of assorted sugar free junk food and that was basically it. My local supermarket has a larger sugar free section than these guys do. I walked out disgusted and will not be back.
The same thing can happen with your customers – if they show up because we did our job on the SEO side, it doesn’t mean they’ll stay unless you have what to offer.

There are No Guarantees

SEO is as much an art as it is a science. There are no 100% guarantees in the world of SEO. That’s because there are too many external factors that can affect your SEO program. So anyone who guarantees you 100%, no matter what that they’ll get you number one rankings for popular keywords is likely lying or is going to suck so much money from you to do it that you’ll end up wishing they were just lying.
On the other hand, what can be said is that it is possible to rank highly and in some cases at number one for some of your keywords, especially the long tail ones.

It’s Not That Hard

People tend to think that SEO is this complicated magical secret. It’s really not all that hard. If you have the time to master the fundamentals and then do the grunt work, you can do it yourself. The thing is, most people who run an online business have better things to do than learn the ins and outs of SEO and do all that grunt work.
That’s why you hire us – think of us as being like the roadside help that you call when there’s a problem with your car. Sure, you could learn how to fix it all on your own and it’s really not that hard to learn about it and do most things yourself. However, most of us have better things to do than learn the ins and outs of our car engines.

It’s Not a One Time Thing

I like to compare doing SEO to doing the laundry. No matter how much laundry you just washed, the moment you finish, you’ve got more to do since the clothes you wore while doing the laundry probably need to be laundered. And with SEO, even once you mount your campaign and get to the number 1 spot, you can’t expect to stay there without continuing to invest time and money in doing so.