Can You Achieve SEO?

I overheard a business owner today say that she had “achieved SEO” on her site.

Achieved SEO? As in, she was on a mission for SEO and she now has it? As in, she has climbed the mountain and is now sitting on top of SEO?

This mindset is what will result in search engine optimization failure for many business owners.

Let’s talk a little bit about what achieve means, so we can understand the error behind this statement.

First, achieve can mean “to carry out successfully,” according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. For example, you can achieve an increase in traffic to your website.

Achieve can also mean “to get or attain as the result of exertion.” You can achieve first place in the baseball tournament.

And finally, achieve can mean “to attain a desired end or aim.” It means to become successful.

While all of these can, on the surface, seem to apply to SEO, the problem I see is that SEO is viewed as something that you reach out for, a goal to be met. It’s viewed as the end of a means.

This cannot be further from the truth.

SEO is actually a process, it is something that you DO. You achieve higher rankings in the search engines as a result of the search engine optimization you do on your website.

You achieve higher sales as a result of the SEO that brought more traffic to your site.

So SEO is actually the means to an end — with the end perhaps being more traffic to your websites, better targeted traffic and a higher conversion rate.

It is possible that the business owner misspoke herself. Perhaps she realizes that SEO is just one tool in the marketing bag. However, there are a lot of home business owners today who think that if they just achieve SEO, people will beat down their doors.

And I don’t want to see you fall into that trap. Remember, SEO is a tool, an ongoing process, to promote your website. If you want to know more about what that process is and how to implement it on an ongoing basis, you need some SEO training.