I recently read an article where someone asked what “Modern SEO” is. That was the first time I’ve heard that term, so I read the comments. Turns out “modern SEO” is mainly making your website easy to navigate and giving users a good experience by making sure the content on the page is relevant to the page title, not having a bunch of flashing images or links all over the pages and other basic, simple features.

Your web designer should have already designed your website to give the visitors a good experience (this is also known as user experience, or UX). If you don’t have a web designer and you’ve created your site yourself, get a web designer to audit your site so you know what needs to be fixed.

Other comments said that “modern SEO” includes a strategy of bringing people to your site, or to the correct page of your site if you are linking to it from an outside source.

Bringing people to your website takes a combination of good SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). SEO refers to optimizing your website for search engines. SEM refers to a strategy of creating backlinks to your site including online advertising, guest blogging, and others (these are very basic definitions). When both of these are used together, and done well, your website shouldn’t* have many issues moving up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

*Even if a great SEO and SEM strategy have been implemented, there is no guarantee that your site will move up in the SERPs. There could be many other websites that have implemented a great SEO and SEM strategy, so you will be competing with them, and there’s could just happen to do a better job because of many different reasons.

The agency, or person, you hire to build your website should recommend, and even insist, that the site be easy to navigate, even if you really want to put flashy images or links to different things all over the pages. Please listen to your web designer, they are an expert in their field and if they recommend you don’t do something, you probably shouldn’t do it.

They should also talk to you about creating content that is related to the page title/topic. This ties in with proper SEO since the search engines crawl the pages to make sure the content matches with the titles. Search engines have been doing that for a couple of years now, if not longer.

So, if a digital marketing agency wants to sell you a “modern SEO” strategy, ask them what is included in it. If it’s the same strategy as a good UX and proper SEO and SEM, and they are charging more for “modern SEO” tell them no thank you and walk away, they are just out to make money, and probably don’t care about what’s best for your company.

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