Being SEO, Play the Long Term Game!
If you want to reach the stars — build your shuttle to take you to the stars, escape the 9 to 5, and win.
Similarly, SEO is a long-term endeavor. But many SEOs still play short-term games.
Some examples of short-term games:
A focus on 30-day cost-per-link (off-site) instead of long-term link generators (on-site).
Making site changes for quick wins (such as aggressive anchor text) that dilute long-term brand affinity by creating a poor user experience.
Many SEOs focus on generating links that have a reasonable cost-per-link that they can measure within a few months.
The problem is, that focusing on this kind of activity pushes you into link generators that are short terms such as guest posts, link bait, etc.
These are lower quality, less scalable options at best. This helps you measure, but it hurts your upside.
When you focus on long-term generators such as business quality and content marketing tied to search volume, you get less immediate measurement, but outcomes that are often twice as good or better if you give your work 12–18 months to see fruit via rankings.
On the other side, many SEOs make site changes that make immediate improvements, such as optimizing anchor text in site navigation but miss the forest from the trees.
These changes often impact brand and long-term search outcomes.
You may feel a very small bump from the optimization, but you’ll always miss the long-term detrimental effects you’ve created because you can’t immediately measure them.
We’re SEOs. Let’s play the long-term games we signed up for.
