Ethical SEO: Building Trust and Rankings the Right Way

In digital marketing, there are two ways to get people to your website. The first is PPC when a company pays to get their name out there on ads. The other is SEO, and this is when you use a series of techniques to increase the relevance of the website so that the site pops up when searched for. Naturally in the world we live in there is a ethically right and wrong way to drive people to your site for both Search engine optimization and Pay Per Click. Although tricking people or the search engine into getting people may get people to your site for now it will have a negative affect in the long run.

PPC is a very effective way for digital marketers to drive traffic to their sites, but so many of them do it unethically. One way that digital marketers hurt their competitors is click fraud. Click fraud occurs when competitors or bots intentionally click on ads to exhaust a company’s budget without any genuine interest in the product or service. This exhausts the budget of their competitors giving them a competitive advantage. Another unethical practice is landing page mismatches. This is when a marketer directs users to irrelevant landing pages violates trust. Ethical PPC practices ensure that the ad content aligns with what users find on the landing page.

SEO has its fair share of unethical practices known as black hat SEO. One common unethical practice is keyword stuffing. This is when a content creator is constantly putting keywords in the content. The content does not flow well and sounds off. This content is meant for the search engine instead of the content consumers. The search engine punishes websites that write only for the search engine. Another black-hat SEO practice is buying backlinks. The search engine wants to see that your site organically got the links through having great content not simply buying the links. These links are often not even related to whatever the site is talking about so it is a big red flag.