SEO, once a highly specialized task
relegated to the back rooms of a website development team, is now
a mainstream marketing activity. This dramatic rise can be attributed to
three emerging trends:
Search engines drive dramatic quantities of focused traffic,
comprising people intent on accomplishing their research and
purchasing goals. Businesses can earn significant revenues by
leveraging the quality and relevance of this traffic for direct sales,
customer acquisition, and branding/awareness campaigns.
Visibility in search engines creates an implied endorsement
effect, where searchers associate quality, relevance, and
trustworthiness with sites that rank highly for their queries.
Dramatic growth in the interaction between offline and online
marketing necessitates investment by organizations of all kinds in a
successful search strategy. Consumers are increasingly turning to the
Web before making purchases in verticals such as real estate, autos,
furniture, and technology. Organizations cannot afford to ignore their
customers’ needs as expressed through searches conducted on Google,
Yahoo!, and Bing.
Search engine optimization is a marketing function, and it needs to
be treated like one. SEO practitioners need to understand the services,
products, overall business strategy, competitive landscape, branding,
future site development, and related business components just as much as
members of other marketing divisions, whether online or offline.
Like any other marketing function, it is important to set specific
goals and objectives—and if the goal is not measurable, it is not useful.
Setting up such objectives is the only way you can determine whether you
are getting your money’s worth from your SEO effort. And although SEO can
be viewed as a project, the best investment, in our
opinion, is to treat it as more of a process—one
which is iterative, is ongoing, and requires steady commitment from the
stakeholders of an organization.
Viewing SEO like PPC (like something you decidedly turn on and off)
is like viewing a healthy diet as something you do only when you are
overweight, as opposed to eating a healthy diet as a lifestyle choice. Too
heavy? Crash diet. PPC too expensive? Pause the campaigns. The tactic may
work in the right application, but with SEO, those with the most success
are those who view site optimization as a lifestyle choice. The results
may not appear instantly, but they will handsomely reward a business after
patient and prudent commitment.
1. Strategic Goals SEO Practitioners Can Fulfill
Although SEO is not a cure-all for businesses, it can fit into a
company’s overall business strategy in several critical ways.
1.1. Visibility (branding)
Consumers assume that top placement in the search engines is
like a stamp of approval on a business. These users believe that
surely the company could not rank highly in the search engines if the
company were not one of the best in its field, right?
If you are an experienced search engine user, you probably
recognize that the preceding statement is not true. However, the fact
is that many consumers, and even business searchers, sometimes
interpret search results as an implicit endorsement.
Therefore, for critical brand terms, the SEO should work toward
improving the search engine rankings for the website she is working
on. There is a subtlety here, though. Few businesses will need help
for their company name; that is, if your company name is Acme Widget
Co., you will most likely rank #1 for that search term even with
little SEO effort. There are a few reasons for this, one of the most
important being that many of your inbound links to your site will use
your company name as the anchor text, and very few links will be given
to other websites using your company name as the anchor text.
However, if you sell solar panels, you will want to rank well
for the search term solar panels. When users see
you ranking highly on that search term, they will assume you are one
of the best places to buy solar panels.
SEO for branding is about ranking highly for the generic search
terms that relate to the purpose of your website.
1.2. Website traffic
Long gone are the days of a “build it and they will come”
paradigm on the Web. Today’s environment is highly competitive, and
you need great SEO to ensure targeted, high-quality traffic to your
site.
Of course, a business that engages with many of its customers
through offline channels can tell them to visit their website to drive
traffic. But the SEO practitioner fills the different, more critical
role of bringing new prospects to your website from an audience of
people who would not otherwise have been interested in, or perhaps
aware of, the business at all.
Experienced SEO practitioners know that users search for
products, services, and information using an extraordinarily wide
variety of search queries and query types. An SEO professional
performs keyword research to determine which search queries
people actually use. For example, when searching for a set of golf
clubs, it may be that some users will type in lefthanded
golf clubs as a search query.
The person who enters lefthanded golf clubs
as a search query may not even know that such a company exists until
she performs that search. Or if she does know that one exists, it was
apparently not top of mind enough for her to seek the company’s
website out directly.
Capturing that traffic would provide the company with
incremental sales of its golf clubs that it probably would not have
gotten otherwise. Knowing that, the SEO process works on a site
architecture strategy and a link-building
strategy to help the
site’s pages achieve competitive search engine rankings for these
types of terms.
1.3. High ROI
Branding and traffic are nice, but the most important goal is to
achieve the goals of your organization. For most organizations, that
means sales, leads, or advertising revenue. For others, it may mean
the promotion of a particular message. An important component of SEO
is to deliver not just traffic, but relevant traffic that has the
possibility of converting. The great thing about SEO is that it can
result in dramatically improved website ROI. Whether you are selling
products and services, advertising and looking for branding value, or
trying to promote a specific viewpoint to the world, a well-designed
SEO strategy can result in a very high return on investment when
contrasted with other methods of marketing.
For many organizations, SEO brings a higher ROI when compared to
TV, print, and radio. Traditional media is not in danger of being
replaced by SEO, but SEO can provide some high-margin returns that
complement and enhance the use of offline media. Data released by
SEMPO in early 2009 shows that organic SEO is considered one of the
very highest ROI activities for businesses (see Figure 1).
In addition, a growing number of businesses operate purely
online. Two examples of these are Amazon and Zappos.
2. Every SEO Plan Is Custom
There is no such thing as a cookie-cutter SEO plan, and for this,
all parties on the SEO bandwagon should rejoice. The ever-changing,
dynamic nature of the search marketing industry requires constant
diligence. SEO professionals must maintain a research process for
analyzing how the search landscape is changing, because search engines
strive to continuously evolve to improve their services and
monetization. This environment provides search engine marketers a niche
within which currency and demand for their services are all but
guaranteed for an indefinite period of time; and it provides advertisers
the continuous opportunity, either independently or through outside
consulting, to achieve top rankings for competitive target searches for
their business.
Organizations should take many factors into account when pursuing
an SEO strategy, including:
What the organization is trying to promote
Target market
Brand
Website structure
Current site content
Ease with which the content and site structure can be
modified
Any immediately available content
Available resources for developing new content
Competitive landscape
And so on…
Learning the space the business is in is not sufficient. You may
have two businesses offering the same products on the market, but it may
not make sense for them to use the same SEO strategy.
For example, if one of the two competitors put its website up four
years ago and the other company is just rolling one out now, the second
company may need to focus on specific vertical areas where the first
company’s website offering is weak.
The first company may have an enormous library of written content
that the second company would struggle to replicate and extend, but
perhaps the second company is in a position to launch a new killer tool
that the market will like.
Do not underestimate the importance of your SEO plan. The only
thing you can do by skipping over this process or not treating it
seriously is to short-sell the business results for your company.
3. Understanding Search Engine Traffic and Visitor Intent
These are typically classified into
three major categories of activity:
Navigational query
This is a query with the intent to arrive at a specific
website or page (e.g., the person types in your company name,
Acme Device Co.).
Informational query
This is a search performed to receive an answer to a broad
or direct question with no specific source in mind (e.g.,
Celtics game score).
Transactional query
A person who types in digital camera
may be looking to buy one now, but it is more likely that she is
researching digital cameras. This is an example of an initial
transactional query, which can evolve in stages. For example, here
are some other types of transactional queries that occur at a
later stage in the buying cycle:
The user types in buy digital
camera. Although there is no information in the
query about which one she wants to buy, the intent still seems
quite clear.
The searcher types in canon powershot
G10. The chances are very high that this user is
looking to buy that particular camera.
The geographic location of the searcher can also be very valuable
information. For example, you may want to show something different to a
searcher in Seattle than to a searcher in Boston.
Part of an SEO plan is to understand how the various relevant
types of searches relate to the content and architecture of your
website.
