At CryptoMarketeer, we get asked a lot of questions from blockchain and crypto clients who come to us looking to do some form of digital marketing. That’s natural, of course.
People who put their business online want to have a presence on the Internet. They want to be visible among many hundreds of competitors, they want their product and services to be seen by potential customers, they want to be known.
One big part of the questions people ask us about is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. What that’s about is really all in the name: optimizing your website so that it is seen by search engines.
With good SEO, your website is noticed by search engines, and ranks well on search page results — after all, most people won’t even bother clicking past the first page of search results. So getting good SEO ranking means your website is seen first and seen most, according to how you position your content and how well it fits into the search criteria from potential customers.
As a result, one of the most common strategies that digital marketing companies do for their clients is to improve their website’s SEO.
Gaming Search Engine Algorithms
At the heart of a search engine like Google (still the world’s favourite way to look up something on the web) is its algorithm, a complex, evolving set of rules that specify what makes a website rank in terms of how high up a search page it appears, and which content will be shown as a search result when users enter a query.
In essence, getting your website to score highly on this algorithm requires a lot of tweaking to the codes that feed the information to search engines. They can be frequency and relevance of keywords used on your page, content descriptions, image names, tags, categories, and even traffic (how many times your content is viewed and how long people spend reading it).
Because much of this algorithm is automated, it also leads to what we call “gaming” of the algorithms — finding out what the algorithm likes and then adjusting your strategies to fit, and then eventually, manipulate these algorithms so that you rank well on SEO.
And at an estimated value of over $70 billion dollars, the SEO industry is not going anywhere soon, and it’s no surprise that people spend a lot of money and time in adjusting their SEO and accompanying content.
As a result, when you go to many companies to boost your SEO rankings, they’ll offer you a range of promises — along with tactics that will get you that boost you desire. Often, these can be legitimate tactics — simply getting the right keywords that fit your audience, or optimizing content and building the right type of content to attract potential customers, or even cleaning up unnecessary code on your website to make it easier for search engines to find and rate.
However, because of the demand for quick results, many also resort to unsavoury or misleading tactics that focus on instant increases to certain metrics that search engine algorithms use to rank a website’s SEO.
Unsustainable metrics
Some digital marketing companies sell you promises. Guaranteed Page 1 ranking on major keywords. Guaranteed backlinks on hundreds of sites through guest posting. Guaranteed traffic and even guaranteed clicks and views.
But the ugly truth behind all of this is just how very little of those results are authentic. They’ll advise you to use unrelated keywords and publish meaningless content that simply increases the frequency of keywords, using automated article-builders to spin 1 article into 20 “unique” pieces that read like awkward thesaurus robots. They’ll use fake accounts and fake websites to do your guest posting. They’ll pay for fake or even hijacked devices to visit your site and stay on it.
And once they’ve delivered, and you’ve paid. They stop. The articles start getting drowned under more spam. The guest post sites expire and turn into broken links. The fake traffic stops coming. Your SEO tanks, and you have no way of reversing the damage.
Worse, your brand reputation could end up getting hurt when people start realizing you’ve been using all these poor-quality tactics, as JCPenny found out when their SEO scandal was exposed or when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) took action against Total SEO for posting fake reviews.
Not only are these tactics unsustainable, but they can even be regarded as criminal!
Good SEO takes time
So whenever our clients ask us for SEO marketing, we always tell them the same thing: yes we can, but here’s how to do it the right way.
We promote building good content related to your product and service. We encourage authentic and constructive engagement with the wider audience. We urge you to focus on product/service features and create useful content that helps people use them better. We talk about genuine content plans, and social media strategies.
We don’t promise guaranteed rankings and other metrics that you won’t be able to sustain (and that won’t bring you any revenue anyway). What we do promise is a professional analysis of what your needs are, the strategies that will help you reach your marketing goals, and superb quality on strategy development and research, content creation and management. In general, kick-ass marketing, especially for crypto and blockchain companies.
So the next time you look for a marketing service for your crypto/blockchain company, think about what you really want.
Unsustainable metrics? Or proven legitimate strategies that bring you long-term, authentic results.
One Comment
Comments are closed.