Many traditional Hong Kong businesses would have hoped that when building a legitimate website, they must align with all the rules that Google has mentioned on search engine optimization and webmaster guidelines. Once they have adhered to these rules, they would soon start to see positive results from the efforts that they have put into the optimization of their business sites. This concept is only half true. The false part is where the missing information is.
Inexperienced SEO specialists may tell you the experience that they have encountered, “global SEO is hard. Let’s go local.” But then they would start to hit another dead end. Experienced SEO expert would tell you SEO is dead, but at the same time SEO is pretty much alive, if you know what you are doing.
When you are focusing on search engines rather than on people, you may be making a big mistake in your SEO effort. Over the past years, user experience has become much more important. Do you remember those days that user experience of a website could have been completely ignored? This is not true anymore.
Optimizing your content and website for the search engines is still important, but since then Google has invested a lot of energy in the search algorithms. Nowadays the web pages that appear within the top of the search results pages (on Google) tend to the populated with sites that have focused strongly on user experience. In other words, Google’s main objective has always been to give people the most valuable and relevant results possible. That’s why even as a local business in Hong Kong, you should put your effort on improving the experience your users can get on your website.
The criteria that you may use to evaluate for yourself whether your site has produced sufficient or good enough user experience may be to monitor the bounce rate of your site, or the average time on site. These two metrics are sometimes hard to measure, as many users would have come to your site, but didn’t click anything with their mouse. The most complicated effort would be to measure when people have visited your site, have they actually scrolled down the page for further browsing.
You must look at SEO as a strategic campaign/project. It is also a long-term game. It used to have a long-term focus, and the timeline seems to have stretched even farther. An example is for any new website in the space (i.e. any local region, or such as Hong Kong), it takes tremendous amount of time to acquire the desired organic search rankings. Even after the rankings are achieved, it still takes time to get the traffic. When a site is done wrong in the beginning, it may take some fixing, and may take more than a year to actually get some decent amount of traffic.