A Word on SEO Strategy. Plus a 35 Point Implementation Checklist
A couple of days ago I wrote about 5 ways social media can enhance your SEO efforts.This is good stuff, but:
SM and SEO certainly overlap, but I still see too many people operating in silos...Neither effort will succeed unless it's part of a larger marketing and analytics strategy." @AndrewCMiller
Wise words. So, SEO is only a fragment of an overall search marketing strategy, which in itself is part of a larger stragetic drive by a business as a means of achieving their goals. So let's take one step back and look at:
- Why you might use search engine optimisation.
- How you can use SEO to achieve business goals.
1. SEO should form part of a strategy to achieve business goals like,
- An increase in brand awareness
- An increase in sales / market share
- A reduction in customer acquisition costs.
- Increasing operational efficiency
- Reducing customer service queries
2. The business benefits of high organic search rankings are the result of a well formulated and sustained SEO effort.
"SEO needs to be iterative and evolutionary. It should learn from itself and its PPC sister to become more targeted and relevant to the intended audience."@RyanDeShazer
So it follows that SEO does not deliver free traffic, because it requires time to first implement your strategy and then also to sustain it. That's human resources working with an analytics package. There are ofcourse opportunities to reduce the financial investment by using automation tools like Wordstream, but let's not get sidetracked.
You want to make sure people who need what you have are able to find you more easily than they can find your competitors.
We want them to visit our website, to place orders, fill out applications and subscribe to our mailing lists. You need to know what keywords are driving tangible results and we need to measure our progress month to month and quarter to quarter.
If you are an SEO newbie, you need to read Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide. For the rest of us i've created a 35 point Search Engine Optimisation Checklist to increase your visibility and rankings. I also recommend reading about Conversion Optimisation to guarantee the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. The landing pages that prospects clickthrough to are critical.
Talk SEO with me @KunalKripalani
