Over the past 10 years or so we’ve seen a lot of different ways of generating traffic to a website, some of these methods are a little bit shady (AKA black hat), some make your eyes roll a little bit (slightly shady), some are just downright spammy, while others are genuinely writing good content and following all of the written and unwritten rules and guidelines.
But what have we also seen over the past 10 years or so?
We’ve seen everybody trying to win at doing the same thing as the next guy. Yes, some things work better than others hence the over loaded bandwagon of SEO experts! But, what happens when everybody does the same thing?
While the simple answer is that nobody is any further ahead than somebody else if everybody is doing everything identical to everybody else. Does that make sense?
So, everybody has maxed out all of their SEO activities and they’ve done everything that Google says is good and they do it very well, after all, they’re taking the advice of an experienced SEO expert. But now, we have tens of thousands of businesses all doing the same thing and all wanting the same thing – the elusive number one spot on Google’s natural search results.
But there is only one top spot.
So we have a business that in the number two slot or the number six slot who, based on relevance, social proof, inbound links and quality of content, deserves that number one slot just as much as the guy who is in the number one slot, but he can’t get it. Even if he does get it he gets its very temporarily and then the position changes hands again.
The alternative? Paid advertising.
But now we have thousands of businesses jostling for the top spot on the paid advertisements. Each started off with a modest budget and a maximum did amount for each advert click and each had moderate expectations based on that budget.
But somebody then decides to increase their bid and takes over the top spot of the sponsored links. Another business then comes along and bids even higher. And so it goes on.
And we’re left with many many businesses that spent an awful lot of money designing the prefect website, creating a popular blog and shelling out retainers to SEO experts month after month after month (probably for several years) only to find that they now have to spend what can only be termed as an extortionate amount of money in order to be visible at all in Google search results.
And the winner is? Google!
Did we really expect anything different?