Thread: What would make you quit SEO?

I'm shamelessly stealing an idea for this topic from Sphinn because it's a quite interesting question.

I do wonder if it's really possible to quit SEO entirely if you're in web business, but the point of SEO is to get traffic so there are some other possibilities. One of the answers in that thread mentioned PPC for example, which I suppose can be made sustainable if you make every paid click count. Other possibilities may be various kinds of direct marketing and social marketing. Instead of a typical content publishing model you could be in the business of creating and maintaining a web application which would mostly rely on some paid advertising to get things rolling, and then viral and social marketing to keep them going (if the app is that good).

So.. has anyone thought about this? I'm not advocating quitting SEO (despite not liking a lot of it much), but it seems like an interesting question.

The real point of SEO is not to get traffic!
It is to rank high in search engines.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

The real point of SEO is not to get traffic!
It is to rank high in search engines.

LoL. Why then you want to rank if not to get traffic.

Somehow down the line, everyone got the idea that SEO is for traffic.
No, it is to rank higher and higher in search engines.
Traffic is a by-product of a high ranking.

Anyone who does SEO just for traffic?
Good luck relying only on search engines.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

Somehow down the line, everyone got the idea that SEO is for traffic.
No, it is to rank higher and higher in search engines.
Traffic is a by-product of a high ranking.

Anyone who does SEO just for traffic?
Good luck relying only on search engines.

Actualy not.

SEO => Ranking => Traffic

So ultimate goal is traffic and traffic is money.

Never heard that someone want to Rank but dont need Traffic. Then ranking is pointless.

Originally Posted by Hellas

Actualy not.

SEO => Ranking => Traffic

So ultimate goal is traffic and traffic is money.

Never heard that someone want to Rank but dont need Traffic. Then ranking is pointless.

Yes and no.

No) If you are doing SEO for a client, your performance may be linked to ranking specific keywords. Even some clients pay a specific amount to rank on on a keyword on a monthly basis.

Yes) There's normally a correlation between traffic and search engine ranking. I would quit SEO if I could fine a better way to generate traffic. I was getting some traffic from online classified ads in the past. But that traffic has dried up after the listing no longer appearing in the search rankings.

Hi,

We all like the idea of traffic. But I would like the right traffic to the site not just traffic.

Isn't SEO a way to get targeted traffic? Right now I just try to place links and ads the I hope people click on it and if it works for SEO that's great too.

Sami

I totally agree with the fact that only traffic is not the matter of concern it should be targeted traffic.....

SEO is soon to be dead anyway. I do care about site structure when building a new project, but even that I consider common sense to have logical model of the website. The rest is not SEO either; quality content with frequent updates, this is for the visitors, but as Google gets smarter it realizes this, you don't need to do actual SEO work. I mean, ask Will, he had many sites that dropped with Panda, and many sites that gone up. Analyzing 100 different aspects there was no logical explanation, so how are you supposed to do SEO work then if you don't even know what is appreciated by Google and what's not. Better just serve the visitors and the rest will come. Or perhaps I'm just getting tired of this SEO thing, and that every second person is a "pro"...

Originally Posted by tetrapak

SEO is soon to be dead anyway. I do care about site structure when building a new project, but even that I consider common sense to have logical model of the website. The rest is not SEO either; quality content with frequent updates, this is for the visitors, but as Google gets smarter it realizes this, you don't need to do actual SEO work. I mean, ask Will, he had many sites that dropped with Panda, and many sites that gone up. Analyzing 100 different aspects there was no logical explanation, so how are you supposed to do SEO work then if you don't even know what is appreciated by Google and what's not. Better just serve the visitors and the rest will come. Or perhaps I'm just getting tired of this SEO thing, and that every second person is a "pro"...

Ah.,,,someone who gets it and is like me.
My motto is:
Write and publish.