For me, search engine education was not that different from “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”.

Life is good, you’re young and adventurous, your vacations are spent going from music festival to music festival, checking your Tinder here and there, and your main concerns are about how to get to the nearest toilet before bursting in a very Tarantino way.

But then you meet that girl (or boy), you start dating, you move in together, and the next thing you know, you’re planning your vacations with that lovely couple, friends of yours. Right there, my friend, is when you realise age is catching up with you.

Yep, this is the story of my life. And my experience with SEO was no different, but in a good way.

When I first started my professional adventure working with digital marketing, all I cared about was ads. That instant gratification with instant results and some quality time spent analyzing my campaigns and those lovely graphics.

Just keep in mind I had no digital marketing training at all, even less on SEO – quite frankly back then, if you would have told me that SEO was the next big thing about smartphones, I would have believed in you. So, in my head advertising was as good as it comes and with my little to no experience managing digital budgets, you can easily imagine the outcome.

It turned into quite the addiction – a truly expensive one. Ultimately, my entire monthly digital budget was being spent in a blink of an eye, and though I had some great results, once the campaigns were over, so were my impressions: my conversions dropped more than 80% and my organic results were close to a very round zero.

What was I doing wrong? The website’s traffic was just great when I had ads running, no reason why it shouldn’t be that way even when they were over, so why weren’t my customers coming back and sticking around?

Well, there was that little thing we call organic search that soon I got familiar with and I quickly understood I was doing nothing about it. I had ridiculous numbers of backlinks and referring domains, the blog was being fed once every three months with some corporate posts, my organic traffic was ridiculous, I had only a dozen keywords I was ranking for (very poorly I must say) and Google was giving me a very nice sea view room on the second page of SERP, it was a total disaster!

It’s when I realized I needed to spend some quality time with Google, try to listen to it and to understand that it takes two to tango: making a relationship work requires a patient investment of time into it.

I started by coming up with an SEO strategy from scratch. I decided to tackle my biggest gaps, the lack of quality and continuous content and the lack of a link building strategy to bring me back quality backlinks, increase my referring domains and get quality organic traffic and leads to my website.

Ultimately, I got things up and running, it took time, assiduity and the realization that this was a long-term investment and that the results won’t be as fast as in my ads adventures, but they’d be long lasting and much more fulfilling.

I was now ready for a serious relationship with Google.

Get in touch with All-in Translations to implement a sound SEO strategy and a winning traffic mix across earned, paid and owned media – regardless of which market and language you operate in.