Mar 11, 2009
Campaign Strategy: SEO & Social Media - Part 1 - Strategy Development
Any website that is aimed towards sales or eCommerce should have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy built in to the development process. Search engine optimization aims to get more visitors to a website by helping it get higher rankings in the search engines. This simply means that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the first page of a search done through the search engine.
Getting Started
Before jumping headfirst into SEO, you must first define the goals of your campaign, by asking yourself the following questions:
- Why am I considering SEO over other traffic driving techniques?
- Does my company need direct sales, traffic, branding or some combination of these?
- Who are the influencers I am trying to reach with a message?
- Is my organization/brand subject to potentially negative material that needs to be controlled/mitigated?
- Do I have products/services you sell, either directly over the web or through leads established online?
Once those questions are answered, you can begin to develop your search strategy, and intertwine it with your other online initiatives (i.e. social media, email marketing, ppc, etc).
The Value of SEO
There are many different types of SEO strategies, and choosing the right one for your business if critical. For this post, I want to review some of the key value behind SEO, in order to prepare you for my next post on intergrating your SEO & Social Media campaign. The following are exerpts from SEOmoz co-founder, Randfish, as he explains the real value behind SEO:
Value # 1: Traffic Generation
“Optimizing a site for search engines and creating keyword targeted content produces direct traffic from the engines, which typically expands into content sharing, direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find, use and enjoy the work you’ve produced. There are thousands of sites on the web that leverage this traffic to serve advertising, directly monetizing the traffic sent from the engines. From banner ads to contextual services like Google’s AdWords to affiliate programs and beyond, web advertising has become a massive ($25B+ according to eMarketer) industry.”
Value # 2: E-Commerce Sales
“One of the most direct monetization and intent-bases for SEO is driving relevant traffic to an e-commerce shop to boost sales. Search traffic is among the best quality available on the web, primarily because a search user has expressed a specific goal through their query, and when this matches a product or brand carried by the web store, conversion rates are often extremely high. Forrester research estimated the e-commerce market to top $235 billion in 2009 (though the recent economic downturn may affect that number somewhat). With so many dollars flowing over the web, it’s little surprise that e-commerce focused SEO is among the most competitive and popular applications of the practice.”
Value # 3: Mindshare/Branding
“A less popular but equally powerful application of SEO is to use it for branding purposes. Bloggers, social media websites, content producers, news outlets and dozens of other web publishing archetypes have found tremendous value in appearing atop search results and using the resulting exposure to bolster their brand recognition and authority. The process is fairly simple - much like traditional advertising’s goals of ad repetition to enter a buyer’s consideration set (see Three Laws of Branding for more), so too do online marketers observe that a website’s pages consistently at the top of search rankings around a particular subject has a positive impact on traffic, consideration and perceived authority.”
Value 4: Lead Acquisition & Direct Marketing
“Although less direct than an e-commerce sale, lead acquisition via the web is an equally valuable and important system for building customers and revenue. Millions of search queries have commercial intents that can’t be (or currently aren’t) fulfilled directly online. These can include searches for services like legal consulting, contract construction, commercial loan requests, alternative energy providers, virtually any service or product people source via the web.”
Value 5: Reputation Management
“Those who’ve dealt with negative or non-existent web information about themselves or their businesses frequently desire to populate the search results with positive links and mentions. SEO enables this process through content creation and promotion via link building. While reputation management is among the most challenging of SEO tasks (primarily because you’re optimizing many results for a query rather than one), it’s in high demand and has a large number of practitioners.”
