Although this title might sound a little bit confusing, believe me, read on and you will completely understand what I mean by “The New SEO Is No SEO”. Gone are the days of searching for the perfect keywords for your site. Stop worrying about the proper tags, coding, keywords and meta titles and descriptions. Search engine optimization can get lot easier, especially if you don’t pull your hair out worrying about SEO. Let me explain how this concept works.

Search Engine Optimization can take up a lot of your time. There are industry terms and techniques that are confusing, not necessary and worst of all, extremely time consuming. You want to be focused on selling your products, your services, and your company, not on which tag goes where on your website.

SEO is something that I see lot of home service business owners, obsess about. Getting free rankings for keywords organically would help you get some traffic to your site for sure, and certainly sales, but many take it a bit too far and spend countless hours or thousands of dollars trying to do SEO.  Hell, I’ve been that person pulling my hair out late at night, checking keywords day after day to see if they’ve gone up further in the rankings.

Yes, getting targeted search traffic is awesome, and very valuable, but if you’re actively doing “SEO”, I’m here to tell you that you’re fighting a mythical game. You don’t know exactly what is going to rank or what factors will get your site ranked, and neither do the so called ‘experts’. Even there is some trickery out there that gets you to the top of page 1 fast, its only a matter of time until google catches on and cuts off that free and easy traffic (aka your site loses substantial rankings).

So What Do I Do Instead of SEO?

I use to focus on search engine optimization and getting specific researched keywords ranked and that was all I cared about but I actually found myself wasting time just worrying about a certain keyword and its performance in Google instead of actually getting anything productive done. You see, a lot of time is also wasted by doing on page tricks to rank faster and higher, but in reality, most of it gets you no where.  These days the Google algorithm is good enough to figure out what your site and pages are about with little input in the way of SEO.  Its even sharp up to pick up when you’re trying to game it.

Rather than worrying about SEO,  you should instead be worried about creating great content for your website. I know that might sound cliche and you’ve heard it numerous times before but it is the winning formula. If you consistently create great content that educates your customers, and engages your readers, Google will do the rest (for the most part, sharing it directly with your customers, and audience when you get the chance does help).

By answering your customers questions via making blog posts and videos, and stuff that people want to see, your website will see organic traffic. You’re much better off focusing on content creation strategies than using keyword ranking techniques word for word, or trying some link building campaign.  One reputable marketing agency for contractors, DarrenSlaughter.com, has even stopped offering “SEO” as a service, offering only blogging.

It’s not rocket science and there is no trickery, just create content with good topics, use relevant information to what you offer on your products and services pages. It doesn’t even have to be perfect. The point is to just get it out there and start helping people with your great content.

With the content method, you will sleep better at night because you won’t be worried about rankings. If you have enough content covering your products, services and some common answers to common client questions, you can get the keyword rankings naturally and without the stress of implementing SEO techniques.

I hope you are realizing that by now, your primary thought should not be focused on rankings – but on creating and posting good content instead. Let the SEO work happen naturally in the background while you’re focusing on helping your clients.

For example: there is a page on my website with number 1 rankings that I created that gets the most traffic thus far. It’s this post here: 4 types of screen every homeowner should know about and what to avoid. It’s from 2014 and this page gets over 200-400 visits per day!  There was no specific focus keyword when this was written and no keyword stuffing or image tags, meta descriptions, page optimization work whatsoever and it’s our most popular page.

Another post ”Keeping dirt and debris out of your screen enclosures” is another top page on my website that drives a bunch of traffic and leads to sales. There are several posts on my site that have great rankings, and I wasn’t even focusing on keywords at all.

One Blog Post and That’s It?

I’m not saying that you can just write up one blog post one time and get first page rankings. Your website needs to also look great, be user friendly and be updated with consistent content. I like to call this, making sure your website breathes. Your website needs to stay relevant and current with your consumers needs. If you choose to put a blog section on your site then do your audience a favor and keep that content rolling out. 2 posts a month minimum is what you should be aiming for.

It happens so often in the home service industry and you’ve probably come across this a few times. You visit a website, and you see a broken page error, or you can’t access their blog page, or perhaps their social media links aren’t working. These are still things you need to pay attention to if you want to get your web traffic to turn into real clients. You need to nurture your website, just like you do with your business.

Convinced Yet?

I hope this tells you that it’s not all about SEO! Focusing on answering questions is a much better use of your time. By uploading great content consistently to your website, you might even be able to delete meta descriptions, titles, keyword loaded images and even be better off without all the SEO tricks.

Online marketing is now all about creating content. That should be a huge plus for those of us who spend our days supervising crews, and dealing with customers.

About the Author

Founder & investor in home service companies. Aside from running these businesses, I love trail running and mountain running.