Not all information found online is created equal and it’s easy to get pushed and pulled in the wrong direction. To help you cut through all the clutter, we put together the top 10 inspirational SEO quotes to guide your strategy. Even if Google unleashes an update tomorrow, these quotes will still hold true.
Enjoy!
“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.” – Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen), WhatDidYouDoWithJill.com
In other words, SEO is an asset. It’s like buying real estate and investing to remodel your kitchen and bath. That work will increase the value of your home so that you can sell it in the future for a profit.
Using SEO tricks or hacks is like trying to beat the house in Vegas. Sure, you might get a couple of quick wins, but in the long run you’re bound to lose because “the house always wins.”
“My rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider.”
– Dave Naylor (@DaveNaylor), Bronco.co.uk Managing Director
The goal of SEO is not to rank #1. The goal is to generate leads and sales for your business.
When you design your website for Google’s crawler, then you’re ignoring the most important part of SEO – your customers. At the end of the day, ranking #1 in Google is completely worthless if your website is not designed properly to convert that traffic into leads and sales!
“On a broad scale, I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way TV, radio, and print are traditionally thought of as marketing tactics.” – Duane Forrester, former Senior Product Manager at Bing
If your prospective customers are searching in Google and other search engines to find your products or services, then you need an SEO strategy. More and more people are using multiple channels to research products and services and search engines are often part of the mix.
So even if you’re using other tactics like TV, radio, and print, you still need an SEO strategy to ensure you’re not losing customers when they go online to do more research.
“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall
This is one of our favorite SEO quotes because it’s so simple, yet so true. Google’s mission is to organize all the information online and present it so that the “best” is at the top of the search results.
How does Google determine what is “best”?
Google’s algorithm takes into account many factors, but one of the most important signals is the number of websites that reference, or link, to the information. Each link is like a vote in that website’s favor telling Google that it deserves to rank high in the search results.
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about tricking Google to get your website to rank high.
Again, it’s important to consider Google’s mission. They want to organize all the information online and present it to the searcher so that only the best websites are at the top of the results page.
With that in mind, the goal of SEO is to make it as easy as possible for Google to find your website (by using proper HTML code, writing relevant copy, designing for ease of use, optimizing page load speed) and then to give Google a reason to rank your website higher than all the other relevant websites (by publishing better and more robust information, getting more links, more online PR).
“Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.” – Adam Audette, Chief Knowledge Officer, RKG
Again, the goal of SEO is not to rank #1, it’s to generate leads and sales.
That means your SEO strategy starts with finding the right keywords that will ultimately drive conversions for your business. Use Google Keyword Planner to search for relevant keywords. Then take it one step further to organize all the keywords you find into two categories:
- buying-intent
- research-intent
As you can probably guess, the buying-intent keywords are the ones where the person searching is most likely looking to make a purchase. The research-intent keywords are the ones where the searcher is most likely just doing research.
Focus your SEO efforts on the buying-intent keywords first to give you the best chance to drive leads and sales.
“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” – Jeff Eisenberg
Many businesses ignore this simple truth.
Think about how hard it is to double the amount of visitors to your website. You’ll have to invest more in SEO, advertising, social media, email marketing, and/or another marketing tactic to drive more website traffic.
Now consider the fact that you would get the same impact on your business if instead, you focused on doubling your website conversion rates.
It’s simple math…
(Traffic to your website) x (Conversion rate) = (leads or sales)
We call this The Growth Formula, and it’s the foundation of how we approach marketing for every client.
Your conversion rate is the number of leads or sales you generate from your website divided by the total number of visitors. As you can see from that equation, you can either double your traffic or double your conversion rate and the result will be the same.
How can you double your conversion rate? Try some of the following ideas:
- Present a stronger, more compelling offer
- Change the layout of your pages so that your offer is more easy to see
- Offer free information in exchange for an email address so you can follow up and convert over a longer time frame
- Use retargeting ads to bring prospects (that didn’t convert) back to your website
- Improve your calls to action so visitors know exactly what step to take next
“The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search.” – Anonymous
This one always gets a laugh. :)
The sad truth with SEO is that most people will not find your website unless you’re on the first search results page. Keep in mind, the first page of Google has limited real estate, and most searchers never scroll past it.
“Better content is outweighing more content.” – Rand Fishkin
This quote has proven more true with every passing year.
In the past, publishing more and more content was a great tactic to expand the reach of your SEO. For example, as you publish more articles about different topics, your website has more opportunities to rank in Google.
However, many businesses took that tactic to the extreme and started to publish low quality articles in an attempt to scale up article production at lower costs.
Google’s Helpful Content Update made this principle official: quality outweighs quantity, and sites with too many thin or low-value pages can see their entire site’s rankings suffer. Always keep this in mind and resist the urge to cut corners on quality in an attempt to publish pages faster.
“What gets measured gets improved.” – Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker was not specifically talking about SEO in this quote, but it’s an important point that deserves to make this list.
What needs to be measured in SEO?
This may come as a surprise, but tracking your rankings alone is worthless! Your rankings should of course be measured, but they tell an incomplete story.
Even more important than your rankings is your website traffic from SEO and your website conversions from SEO.
We call Tracking the Foundation of The Growth Formula because without it, you’re making every marketing decision blind.
Need Help with SEO?
If you need help with your SEO strategy, we can help. Request a free SEO quote, and we’ll review your site and identify the biggest opportunities to improve your rankings and organic traffic.
