I like to trade stocks and I like SEO. I think the reason that I like them both is because they are actually similar in many ways.

Risks and Rewards

In stock trading, it’s not secret that there are risks and rewards. In general, the bigger the risk, the bigger the potential for reward. Day traders are especially familiar with this general rule as they tend to take higher risks than medium or long-term investors. In SEO, I think the same logic can be true. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

First, let’s assume that you’re a small fish in a big pond, as most of us are on the Web. If you want to run your own website and compete for the most popular search terms related to your business, you’ll likely have a lot of competition. By developing content, building links and slowly trying to make your way to the top of search rankings, you can invest a great deal of time, money and energy. If you make it to the top for your targeted keywords, you’ll likely reap the rewards of high traffic volume to your website along with, hopefully, high conversions. Now, let’s say that you run out of resources before you make it to the top. What happens then is that you may end up with little or no traffic and conversions. In the same way that a stock trader made lose big on a risky deal, you’ve lost big. Conversely, taking a more conservative approach and targeting less-competitive markets may have yielded a better result than nothing, but not as good as the potential in the more risky scenario.

Next, consider that you run a website in a lucrative and highly competitive market. Over the past few months, you’ve seen decreases in traffic and conversions from organic search which is costing you’re company a good deal of money. You also notice your competitors using less-than-honest tactics to inflate their search engine rankings. What do you do? Well, a high risk, high reward strategy might be to follow suite and use similar tactics to stay competitive. The risk involved is that the search engines may penalize you, if and when you’re discovered. This would certainly put you in a worse place than you started. If you’re never to get caught however, then you’re good to go. The more conservative approach in this scenario would be to continue following SEO best practices and try to ride out the storm, hoping that you’re competitors tactics don’t work in the long run. The reward to this low risk strategy is that you’ll be able to maintain at least some level of organic traffic, just not the level that you’re used to.

Rough Waters

Just like the stock prices in a volatile market, websites also occasionally experience shake-ups. In the stock market, world events, economies and governments can drastically affect the price of stocks. On the web, these shake-ups are usually caused by algorithm adjustments on the part of the search engines. While these changes occur regularly and often have little noticeable affect, there are situations where the opposite is true. Just like stock investors, SEO’s have to reinvent their strategies during volatile times if they want to come back out on top.

Successful Traders and Successful SEO’s

Successful stock investors and successful SEOs have personality traits in common. The first important trait is the ability to re-invent themselves when the market calls for it. There’s no time in either field to sit back and wait for things to happen. While the fundamentals of both games stay the same, their application of these fundamentals needs to evolve to stay competitive. Second, successful individuals in either field need to be able to recognize when to apply high risk strategies and when to apply lower risk strategies. Different situations call for different responses and making the right call in critical to success.

Tags: seo theory | Category Organic Search