SEO is Insanity

If you've been in the business world for any length of time, you've probably seen the following somewhere—in a building lobby, on a website, or on a nicely framed poster in an office:

The Definition of Insanity: Doing the same thing, the same way, and expecting different results.

Seems reasonable and intuitive, so if you accept that statement as true, you'd also have to accept the logical extension of that statement:

If you do the same thing, the same way, you should expect to get (roughly at least) the same results.

This holds true across many if not most areas of business and life in general: manufacturing, research, software development, teaching, cooking...but not SEO.

Before I began doing SEO work for clients, I'd done it for a number of other websites: my own, friends', and corporate employers. I coded, I tested, I read articles and blogs. I applied the methods learned to client websites, and got excellent results. Here's one example:

55 total search terms
Before SEO:
Top 20 positions across the three major search engines: 17
Top 10 positions across the three major search engines: 9
Top 5 positions across the three major search engines: 5

After SEO:
Top 20 positions across the three major search engines: 88
Top 10 positions across the three major search engines: 73
Top 5 positions across the three major search engines: 55

Recently, however, I worked on two websites where, although SEO results improved, the final outcome was disappointing. Now, I thrive on getting great results for clients. I get profoundly frustrated when I don't. So, I coded, I tested, I read some more articles and blogs. Small improvement.

These sites have numerous external relevant links, keyword density right in the sweet spot, and optimized meta tags. Here's an example analysis:

Did the same thing, the same way, utilized established best practices in SEO, and—got only marginal improvement.

What's a person to do? Continue to code, test, and read some more articles and blogs. But when the consistent application of proven methods produces wildly varying results, one can only conclude from this: SEO is insanity.

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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom