The Illusion of Communication

I’ve presented this topic to many groups before and I usually start out by telling everyone that a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is a microcosm of your business environment. So, all you really have to do is whip out the business and marketing plans that you’ve been working on and it’s essentially done: SEO in a bottle.

What typically happens at this point is I get a lot of blank stares and a large, quite room. Apparently, there aren’t a whole lot of completed, well-thought out business and marketing plans in the room. If you happen to be just like me (and all the other small business owners in the world) who lack an articulated business plan, but still want to move forward with an SEO program that works, then what follows will be a great place to start.

How to Create a Successful SEO Campaign

There are five key steps to launching a successful SEO campaign, each one being as critical as the other, so make sure you give each step its due attention!

Gather Data

There are many ways that you can gather data for your SEO campaign. Here are 4 of the best methods:

1. Brainstorm with your colleagues, employees, your boss. Get ideas, any ideas. You can eliminate the bad ones later in the process.
2. Talk to your customers. Find out how they found you and if they found what they were looking for.
3. Check your site’s search referrals/web log (e.g., Google Analytics)
4. Check the competition. Go to their Web sites and view their meta data and see what keywords they think are important. (For most browsers on Windows systems, you can view the meta data by right-clicking and choosing “view source” from the right-click menu).

Create Your Plan

With your data gathering complete, it’s time to assess your own organization. Out of all the things you uncovered in the first step, what sort ideas are relevant to what your company does? Look at your data for patterns and see how thing match up to your actual capabilities.

As an extension of this process, you will also need to set quantifiable goals; if you are selling something, define what and how much and in what time frame. If you are generating leads, define what information you need for it to be a good lead.

While going through this exercise, it is also important to understand what you can deliver. For example, you may discover that visitors to your site would convert to leads in high numbers if you offered a white paper. However, your company doesn’t currently have a good white paper available, and it would cost too much to hire someone to write it. So, if you can’t deliver a white paper, don’t use it as part of your plan! On the other hand, you might consider what you already available, such as a users’ guide or an existing manual of some sort. These can usually be repurposed for your needs (at least in the short-term) and for much less effort and cost than creating a deliverable from scratch.

Research Keyword candidates

At this point you should have a very robust list of keywords and ideas on how to use them. But not all of these keywords are going to be good keywords for your business. There are many different keyword research tools out there (email me, and I’ll be happy to send you a list of several). The goal here is to go through your list and weed out the keywords that will cost too much (especially important for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns) or will bring in too little traffic.

Additionally, think about what other campaigns do you have going on. For example, if you are using billboards, and you have a big picture of a bulldog on all your signs, you may want to include “bulldog,” and all it’s variations in your final set of keywords, despite the fact that the keyword “bulldog” didn’t do well with your research tools. Someone seeing your billboard might not remember the Web site address or the company name on the sign, but they may remember the bulldog.

Organize Your Data

Once you have completed your keyword research, it’s time to separate the wheat from the chafe. Put together a matrix or a chart that identifies the keywords you need to use, what goals they will be supporting, and how you plan on using them.

Confirm the Plan & Execute!

Review your goals, the keywords, and the overall plan. Make sure that your assets (whatever it is that you will be giving to your visitors) work in a cohesive and holistic manner with your overall business goals. Ask yourself, can you accomplish your goal with the assets on hand and the chosen keywords? If the answer is no, then assess what’s not working and start the process over. If the answer is yes, then execute the plan!

Posted by Matthew under SEM & Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Although I never got a chance to actually meet her at the conference, a big shout out to Megan in the Pink, who was nice enough to take notes during the SEM for SMB conference. Here’s one of the bits she recorded:

Q: Ideas on how to leverage SEM techniques for product research?
A1: Not a great tool for innovating products.
A2: You can look at Google Trends, etc, but that’s based on today. At an extreme, you can build a website about a potential product, get PPC info and look at the data
A3: Look into the social world - what’s happening in the blogosphere? What are people talking about/looking forward to?
A4: SEO not so much, look at social media and PPC.
Moderator: If Ford asked his audience what they wanted, he’d say “a faster horse”.

I disagree with the answers here (strongly with most of them, but A2 and the Moderator are almost on the right track). Here’s a little clip from my session at the conference, which was on keyword research. My belief is, if you can structure your keyword research properly, it can be a really powerful way to evaluate your business, your customers, your prospects, and whether or not what you are trying to offer the marketplace is at all compatible with what people are really searching for.

Granted, if you are looking at things at face value, then it’s only really good (as A2 mentions) for historical information. However, if you look at it too literally, then you will likely be in danger of delivering the exact value the marketplace is looking for … e.g., making faster horses (as the moderator and Henry Ford point out).

I hope to put something more substantial around this … I may even make the keyword presentation more robust to support this stance. Check out the clip below and let me know what you think. And I’ll let you all know when I get this session put together.

Posted by Matthew under SEM & Internet Marketing & Innovation & Marketing Strategy & Business Strategy | 1 Comment »

Let’s see if I can’t make a semi-coherent post today … I’ve got a lot of catching up to do and I’ve been deep in replying back to a zillion-and-a-half emails since I was essentially out of circulation for two days from the conference.

But the conference rocked. It was one of the best I’ve ever attended. In fact, I learned about a new tool (or at least, it’s new to me) called WebSiteGrader via the SEM for SMB event.

To use WebSiteGrader, all you have to do is type in the URL of your web site and it will give you grade based on how well you’ve implemented certain SEM (search engine marketing) items. If you are looking to improve your site’s ranking and exposure, this tool is a great way to first evaluate what needs to be done and secondly prioritize that list. What it doesn’t grade you on is design, layout, and usability, which I think are equally important to the grades it gives you on SEM issues, but you’ll have to evaluate that another way.

The hidden gem in this tool? You can use it to evaluate your competition!

Posted by Matthew under SEM & Internet Marketing | No Comments »