Your WordPress SEO plugin can not bring in new customers and make you more money. True/false?

Well, it can’t on its own.

Don’t get us wrong, WordPress and Wordspress SEO Plugins are excellent tools for small businesses on Long Island and beyond. They help make it clear which basic SEO fields should be filled in on your website in a user friendly easy to digest format (e.g. most popular SEO Plugins really just help you fill in your website title, description, keywords, page/post formats and which pages will be indexed).

The issue: they are not exhaustive SEO tools. They are not comprehensive. And they do not get at dozens if not hundreds of other SEO factors that together outweigh the impact of the words you put into your SEO Plugins. Your Long Island SEO company can provide you with much more in depth information when you get in touch.

So filling in information is not an SEO strategy and it is not performing SEO. Here are four reasons why:

Off Page SEO
Off page SEO refers to SEO activities that happen external to your website such as link building activities. Building good quality links to your website from high quality relevant news and industry sources is essential to increasing your rankings. Many of you know that already but the question is “how?” and “where?”  Since the Panda and Penguin updates, we get more and more calls from prospects who have been hurt by algorithm updates. They have been penalized by black hat link building practices provided by other SEO firms. They have lots of questions we help answer.

Bottom line: SEO plugins don’t tell you what your link building strategy should be or how and where you should get the links you need. In fact SEO Plugins are simply not built to do your off page SEO and they do not obtain the links you need.

Website Content Quality
By content we mostly refer to your words and images and how they are packaged together to communicate to someone on your website.  If your website is not filled with unique, relevant content that targets your audience with a strong message, or if you website is too small and lacks content readable by search engines, no SEO plugin is going to help you attract new customers, because the search engines are looking for content.

Bottom line: SEO plugins don’t create unique ideas, inspiration and advice that demonstrates how you will help customers. People do. SEO plugins don’t do your thinking and content writing.

Website Conversion
Conversion just means achieving a certain desired action by the visitor on your website such as calling you or filling out your contact form or making a purchase, for example.

Bringing in high quality traffic comprised of targeted, prequalified leads with “intent” is tough. If you do not have a means of converting visitors to leads, all of the SEO in the world will not bring new business to you and your cost per lead will be much higher. Spending more on a lead with less conversion translates to less ROI (return on investment).

Bottom Line: An SEO Plugin can not create your landing page content, your offer or your promotional strategy to naturally move people toward becoming customers. SEO Plugins can’t do your cost benefit analysis and drive data based decisions on what “you should do next.” SEO Plugins can only bring a horse to water.

Website Branding
Who are you, and more importantly who do your customers believe you are?  If your business is undifferentiated in the market or if your branding is poor and does not resonate with your customer base, prospects online will go elsewhere. They have lots of choices.

Bottom line: An SEO Plugin is not branding. Branding helps drive up the perceived value of your business and helps create loyalty and awareness in the market.  A plugin is merely a tool to complete certain information in your website often overlooked by the do it yourself small business owner.

The list goes on.

In sum, SEO Plugins by themselves are not your marketing machine, your marketing VP or your marketing strategy. SEO done right is really just targeted marketing to get prequalified consumers interested in your products and services online.

We haven’t found a plugin that can do that yet. Have you?

Focusing on your business model, developing a marketing strategy and putting the thought behind your campaigns is what will yield results in the long run.

Best of luck.