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How Important Is SEO in 2020, Really?

Ranking on Google is often seen as the holy grail of marketing. But how important is SEO in 2020, really? Well, it’s a lot like winning on the college recruiting trail. Here’s what I mean…

I never excelled at most sports, but I do play a good game of Ultimate (or Ultimate Frisbee, as some call it). My oldest son is passionate about the sport, and he plans to play on his college’s club team next year.

Ultimate isn’t a sport that’s “arrived” yet, but a handful of schools have begun recruiting players for their teams. For those colleges, they practically have their pick of athletes, simply because there’s hardly any competition.

(Quick aside: know why they call soccer the Beautiful Game? Because Ultimate hadn’t been invented yet!)

As more schools begin recruiting Ultimate players, the competition will heat up. Recruits can only take so many official visits, and they’ll have to get picky with the schools they pay attention to. Some colleges will build elite programs. Power 5 conferences will have an immediate advantage over other conferences. It won’t be long before modest schools are lucky to get 5-star players, and they’ll have to settle for 2- and 3-star athletes. They’ll look back and wish for the days when they had a shot at getting noticed.

Maybe you’ve made the connection already. The recruiters aren’t really recruiters, but content. Years ago, it was a lot easier to get your audience’s attention through SEO, because there was less competition for eyeballs. But marketing content has exploded, and the competition for Page One on Google is ridiculously enormous. Sites with greater authority, more content, and bigger budgets will always win the battle for position on Google.

Mark Schaefer calls this phenomenon “content shock,” and he does a fantastic job of exploring the implications for marketers. Go check it out — it’s a must-read for anyone doing anything in marketing.

The good news is, content shock doesn’t mean your content is doomed. On the contrary! You can still score points with SEO, and you can even win the marketing game by relying on other methods to boost your content. It raises the question, How important is SEO in 2020, really?

Let’s take a look at all that, through another college recruiting story.

John Beilein’s SEO Strategy

John Beilein had a search problem like most small businesses do. Well, really he had a recruiting problem, but if he were a marketer, it would be a search problem. Having lived in Ann Arbor most of my life, I’m a big Michigan basketball fan. So naturally I see a connection between U-M basketball and SEO!

In 2007, head coach John Beilein stepped into a basketball program at The University of Michigan that was limping along. The once-elite program had crumbled and struggled to compete for a decade. College recruits had no living memory of a time when the program was relevant. Beilein knew if he was going to build a winning program, it wouldn’t come by competing with Duke and Kentucky (or Michigan State) on the recruiting trail.

In his second season at Michigan, Beilein’s team made their first national tournament run and in 2013 they made it to the national title game. In a dozen seasons at Michigan, John Beilein appeared in the NCAA Tournament nine times. In marketing terms, the little guy won the marketing game — and he did it without getting on Page One of Google.

Beilein found elite athletes here and there, but he didn’t depend on recruiting them to win. Likewise, you don’t have to beat your competition at SEO — you just need to find the right opportunities. Here’s what you can learn from John Beilein’s recruiting strategy.

Go Where They Ain’t

When John Beilein got to Michigan, the bluebloods owned the recruiting trail. 5-star players were out of his league, and he knew it. So he went elsewhere. Michigan recruited overlooked athletes that were highly coachable, with specific qualities he could build a program on. They focused on gifted players no one else was paying attention to, with talents that fit Beilein’s scheme.

Likewise, you can go where the competition isn’t going. Get as niche as possible with SEO, and focus on long-tail keywords in a space that’s relatively untapped. Become the brand that specializes in that space and develop a reputation with that specific audience. Let the other guys fight over the mainstream customer base — you’ll serve a niche that no one else has noticed.

Not only does that eliminate competition, it may give you the opportunity to raise your prices. Because now you’re THE specialist for that audience.

Deliver Quality

Beilein was able to recruit the right kind of players that fit his scheme, but it wouldn’t have meant a thing if he couldn’t develop them and churn out wins on the court. Without a quality performance, recruitment is just a gold star for effort.

No matter what you do to make Google happy, it’ll be pointless if your content isn’t world-class. Winning eyeballs through SEO doesn’t necessarily translate to sales.

I once worked with a client that was enamored with their website views. And they had great numbers any small business would be excited about. The problem was, their website visitors weren’t ideal customers, and visits didn’t translate to sales.

Search engines don’t buy from you. If you’re aiming for Google, you’ll miss your customers. Instead, focus on high-quality content your buyers will be fanatical about. Provide value, build their trust, invest in them. And keep doing it, again and again and again. That’s what will win a following that converts.

Don’t Stop Recruiting

Just because SEO isn’t the most important thing in marketing, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Beilein signed some highly recruited players, even though he didn’t amass them. You want to get found through organic search when you can — but if you’re a small business with a fledgling marketing strategy, you should probably just focus on a few SEO basics.

For example, do some basic keyword research, but don’t kill yourself over it. Here’s a few tips:

Think like your customers. What search terms will your audience use? They might misuse some jargon, or they might prefer a term that professionals don’t use. Build keywords around that.
See what Google suggests. Start typing search phrases into Google that you think customers will use, and see what the search engine auto-completes. Those are common search terms. Also check out the related searches at the bottom of the search results page.
Use free tools. For most small businesses with a limited marketing budget, it doesn’t make sense to pay for SEO tools. You can find some great keyword tools for free. Start with Google’s keyword tools. If you’re launching a big campaign, you might consider signing up for a free trial of a paid tool, then canceling it after the trial.

Handpicked related content: Boost Your Marketing Results Without Busting Your Budget

Control What You Can Control

Beilein never fit the mold of a college head coach. One of the things that got people’s attention was his willingness to let go of things he couldn’t control. It freed him up to get really serious about the stuff he could control, and that was one of the keys to his program’s success.

In the SEO world, there’s a LOT that you can’t control. Especially when competition is crowded and you’re vying for the attention of an audience you have no guarantee of engaging. But you can control your content, and you can make sure it’s optimized for search engines to discover it. In short, you can invest in on-page SEO — optimizing your web pages and blog posts in a way that search engines like.

Here’s a few tips to get you started with on-page SEO:

Link to authoritative sites and your own pages. Don’t go overboard with it — six hyperlinks for every 1,000 words is a good rule of thumb.
Break up long blocks of text into sections, and use keywords in the section headings.
Use long-tail keywords in your content.
Use alt tags on your images, and include keywords in your alt tags.
Include a meta description of about 150 characters.
Include keywords in URLs.
Make your content easy to skim and easy on the eyes. Use bulleted lists, embed images or videos in long content, use short paragraphs.
Don’t stuff your content with keywords. Just write naturally, for humans (not search engines). Also use synonyms for your keywords, which makes your writing sound more natural.

There’s a Lot More to Winning Than Recruiting

This is perhaps the biggest takeaway. You can win on the recuiting front and still have a losing season. John Beilein beat recruiting powerhouses on the court — where it counts — time and time again. The same goes for SEO. There’s more to promoting your content than SEO. Consider these ideas for your own content promotion:

Share on social media, and be consistent with it.
Syndicate your content. Get it listed on curation sites like Medium.
Do some guest blogging on prominent sites that have SEO juice. Let them recruit on your behalf!
Share your content with your email lists and subscribers.
Participate in online communities such as LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Reddit, or Quora.
Target specific people who are excited about your brand — industry influencers, fanatical customers, and followers who love sharing your content.
Promoting an event or a campaign? Add a link to your email signature.
Get speaking gigs at conferences, podcasts, webinars, or chambers of commerce.