Affordable SEO is an Infinite Game

There are two kinds of games: finite games, that have a defined endpoint and usually a winner, and infinite games, which don’t. Both kinds of games have rules, moves, and goals, but infinite games’ goals move as the player moves. (Getting rich is an infinite game, too, as anyone who has ever reached their financial ‘goals’ can attest.) Either kind of game can be quit, but only infinite games can be voluntarily played for your entire life (some games of Monopoly notwithstanding.)

What the heck does all of this have to do with SEO? Simple: if you’re looking for affordable SEO, you’d better be prepared for an infinite game.

The rules of affordable SEO are as follows:

• * Get your website ranked more and more highly for more and more keywords.
• * Don’t spend too much money while doing so.

You can see from the rules themselves that there is no “winning” in SEO. There is only accumulating more and more keywords in your “First place ranking” pool. There is also an ever-changing goalpost in the second rule as well: “too much” is an entirely relative term. Too much may be a specific amount, like $50/month, or you can define it as a percentage of your income, but no matter how you define it, your definition will almost certainly change over a long enough period of time.

When you ‘play the game’ of SEO, your ‘playing piece’ is your website. SEO choices define the ‘moves’ you make with your piece. Your goal is to make sure that your ‘moves’ take you higher up the ranks than your competitor’s do. There’s a terrible amount of different SEO tactics that you can take, and they don’t all work equally well (or even work the same way for each industry), which makes research and information gathering vital to long-term SEO success.

That’s where SEO companies — and the notion of ‘affordable’ SEO — come into the equation. To play the game of SEO on the level of the big boys, you can’t do it yourself; you need help. Getting the smartest players that your money can buy to join your team, well, that’s the move you need to make first.