SEO Point of Diminishing Returns

I get asked about this a LOT, both from clients, and from readers. The issue at hand is basically this:

If Wal-Mart and IBM are doing it, doesn't that mean it is an effective tactic?

In short, no.

It means that they have the budget to make time intensive nudges that return small percentages.

See, with a small business startup, the point of diminishing returns is different than for a large corporation. It works like this:

• If you can spend $100 to make a change in your site, and that change doubles your income, then it is worth it to do it if you are making more than $50, right?
• If you have to spend $500 to make a change that only gives you a 1% increase in earnings, then you'd have to be making more than $50,000 to make it worth it. 
• A large corporation can afford to spend $10,000 to have a professional do some fussy little tweak that only gives them a .1% return in profits, because for them, .1% is a whole heckuva lot bigger than it is for a small business. 

With SEO, the tasks fall into about 6 categories:

1. Scams and speculations, and things that might have mattered once, but no longer do. These are things like redundant urls, duplicate content myths, groundless fears about outbound links, and other useless bits of info. Sure, there are concerns with duplicate SITES, or with bad quality outbound links, but there is also a lot of incorrect information that will waste your time.

2. Black Hat SEO. Where no self-respecting website owner wants to go. Hidden text, invisible GIF links, commented keywords, keyword stuffing, etc. These won't just waste your time, they'll eventually kill your site.

3. Things that are easy to do, that give you a big return. High quality content, basic title tags, good backlinks, good site structure, on page link optimization, and simple site coding fall into this category (if you set up your site that way).

4. Things that are still simple, don't return a whole lot, but that are easy to do and worth doing anyway. This includes meta tags, alt tags, etc.

5. Things that are more complex, but do return well, which are worth doing a little at a time. Optimizing title tags for every page, simplifying your page coding if it was not done right to start, getting text near the top of every page, link optimization if it was not done to begin with, etc.

6. Fussy, picky and technical things that really don't make much difference to a small site, but which take a LOT of time to do, and are very costly. This category of things will eat up your time and resources, but won't return enough traffic to make it worth the money or effort. This includes page by page intensive analysis and minor tweaking to nudge results up by minute amounts.

Ok, so we want to avoid the first set of things. They are a waste of time.

We want to avoid the second ones, they are stupid.

We want to DO everything in the third category - it will unquestionably help our site.

In the fourth category, we want to do the things we are able to do, just because they ARE simple (and can often be built right into a site template).

In the fifth category, we are going to get into the gray area for small business. Here is where I tell my clients, "Do things a little at a time, and don't fret if you don't get it all done." Because they probably will help you long term, but they are not make it or break it things.

In the sixth category, we can worry about it after we make our first million.

The great thing is that of the MOST important CODING tactics, most of them can be built into the site template! I call this, "Level 1 SEO" for my web clients, and I include it as part of every site.

When you create the template for your site, you put in a title tag that works for your whole site (later you can customize it for each page, but for now, it will at least show the most important thing for all the pages), meta tags that work for the whole site, alt tags in standard graphics, optimized navigation links, site structure that logically segments the content, text bar at the very top of the page, etc. Then you use that template for your whole site, which has everything already optimized for the simplest, most effective coding.

After you create the individual pages, and put in content (good quality, of course), then you go back and improve the title and meta tags, and insert alt tags into images that appear only on individual pages.

With SEO, it is important that small business owners worry about the most important things that really matter, and not get distracted into worrying about things that won't affect their bottom line significantly.

Written by Laura Wheeler
Owner, Firelight Web Studio
http://www.firelightwebstudio.com 
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