Search Engine Optimisation | The Emperor's New Clothes

Some things just aren’t meant to be understood - like why we pay for things for no apparent reason.

Why do we leave a tip in restaurants? We read the menu; we’re happy with the price; we enjoy the meal. And then, for some reason that still leaves me bewildered, we pay for the meal plus a little more besides, that no-one asked for. We don’t tip the newsagent or the butcher. We’ve never left a tip in Tesco – but when we go for a meal we pay more than we’re asked, even if service is included.

But that’s nothing compared to the weird, impenetrable world of the Internet. Get in bed with any Internet service and you’re likely to feel at a loss for most of the time. You’ll pay for things you’ve never heard of, that you don’t understand and that, half the time, you can’t begin to explain.

Hosting, graphic design, submissions, copywriting, web layout and design, optimisation: they’re all available to you, at a cost, and having paid for any or all of them you will still have nothing tangible to show for it.

Or, at least, that’s a view perpetuated by the same frustrated individuals who don’t understand why they need to pay for a whole host of things, like water, tips and – a personal favourite – garage servicing and repairs.

I had two cars in for a full service last week within a day of each other. To make a short story even shorter I was £500 lighter on Wednesday than I was on Monday. I didn’t feel the costs were extortionate for the work that was required. I really didn’t want to attempt the work myself. I’d rather hack my own leg off than wave goodbye to £500 needlessly, but actually, this wasn’t needless because I’d rather hack both legs off than attempt a car repair.

And there’s the difference.

I know, in the same vague sort of way that I know how the earth was born and how cheese is made, that car repairs are time consuming, oily, and a real pain without the proper tools. I know that my mechanic can do in half an hour what would take me days. But it is essential work. I’m getting 5 mpg more now than I was last week. Don’t ask me how but that definitely qualifies as ‘a good thing’ because I know, in vaguest sub-Tomorrow’s World levels of understanding, what’s required and I equally know that I can’t be bothered.

SEO isn’t like that. Most people don’t understand the first thing about optimisation. They are paying for a service about which they know almost nothing. And because they are as unaware of the intricacies of search engine optimisation as they are of, say, quantum physics, there’s the sense of the unknowable about it. That it isn’t really real. That it is a case of the emperor’s new clothes.

Search Engine Optimisation is one of those things that you baulk at paying for in the same way you don’t want to pay for a car service, road tax, a new iron or a vacuum cleaner. But you need all of those things – and if you have a website you need optimisation.

Even then, however, SEO - quirky, idiosyncratic thing that it is - manages to be even more obtuse in showing its worth. Once you’re reluctantly shelled out for that iron you can, at least, plug it in and, well, iron things.

Optimisation takes time. It really does need to, in a sense, mature. Not to the same extent as whisky or wine, of course, but like a particularly impressive camembert SEO needs a couple of months to get going. Any optimisation worth its salt will take around six months to start showing its full potential.

So it is true that whilst it’s hardly the emperor’s new clothes, search engine optimisation doesn’t help itself in the PR department. It’s a technical, complex process that will be applied to your website and for the most part you’ll be blissfully unaware that anything has changed unless a copywriter’s been busy.

Then there are a host of article submissions to hundreds of linked, relevant sites that you will be almost entirely oblivious to.

Finally, there’s a wait of a few months whilst the optimisation, that will have been ongoing throughout each of those months, reaches full maturity and starts showing some real results. And all through that time you’ll be wondering what it was you paid for.

At around the two month point you’ll call your search engine optimisation expert on the pretext of something or other, but really to see what’s happening. You’ll be told to hold your nerve. And you will. And then, not long after the call, you’ll see your website starting to climb the search engine rankings. As time progresses it will climb further and faster, and as long as you keep optimising your website will keep climbing.

Have faith.

SEO is real and its results will be tangible. You don’t need to understand how to do it to understand what results it can offer. Give it time and it will repay you handsomely. It just needs a little time to get going.

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