I recently read yet another outstanding blog post by the great Gab Goldenberg (yes, I’m a groupie) - this one on promoting content via advertisements. It raised a pretty big question in my mind. And by “pretty big” I mean massive…collossal…gargantuan…
In his post, Gab said that Web 2.0 appears to be causing a community-building trend amongst advertisers. And then he said the following about the application of advertiser-community-building to SEO:
“When you’re…building links, you can be quite successful going with a content marketing approach. And if you own the community, you get the opportunity for both brand awareness/top of mind campaigning and your own customized direct response package. Which means you can be more aggressive with your SEO…as well as reduce your dependency on search traffic.“
In case you couldn’t tell by the bolded text, that was the gargantuan-question-raising bit of Gab’s blog post.
I was under the impression that SEO was all about the search traffic. Non-branded search traffic, that is. So what does reducing my dependancy on search traffic mean when the reason my livelihood exists is due to the tremendous search volume for a specific keyword on, say…Google? What is this reduced dependency on search traffic? WHY ME??? (That last question wasn’t so relevant…it just sort of popped out…)
Back to the topic in hand…
I think what I’m getting from Gab (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here) is that he believes SEO is no longer SEO. It is now…wait for it…almost there…online marketing!
Ouch?
The fact is, SEO has been trending in that direction for a good solid while now. A couple of years ago it was all about the rankings. The very scientific thought process went as follows:
“If I’m ranking for a keyword that I think is relevant (never mind the actual relevancy or search volume), I must be making money!”
And then the Lord spoke…and by “Lord” I mean your accountant…and he (or she) said as follows:
“By the way, website owner, you’re not making any money.”
And it was not good.
Thus SEO evolved, as do all things that eventually become good. And then it was about rankings plus ROI - i.e. conversions. Who CARES if you’re ranking for “induced endothelial dysfunction” - it has a monthly search volume of zero! Definitively, marketing to an audience of zero is less then worthless - it costs money, which puts you on the negative side of worthless.
Having said all that, I still don’t entirely agree with Gab on his reduced dependency on search traffic theory. Yes, building an online community that will cultishly have all of their online discussions via your company’s online platform is an ideal brand-building situation and should certainly be integrated as a goal of your online marketing strategy. However, it should be done in tandem to and not instead of your SEO strategy. Online marketing is a pretty broadly-defined term - it includes SEO, affiliate marketing, e-commerce…PPC, CPM…blah blah…technical online marketing jargon…
Having a well-rounded online marketing strategy as part of a well-rounded overall marketing strategy isn’t a bad thing - it’s quite the opposite, in fact. Which just goes back to my point - Gab, I disagree with you. You don’t want to reduce your dependency on search traffic - dropping that part of your marketing strategy would be a big mistake. There is a dependency on search traffic because marketing depends on the people who are being marketed to (yes I just ended a sentence with a preposition). And people in general are searching, which is the basis for SEO in the first place. Maybe to some extent it depends on your vertical - “induced endothelial dysfunction” vs. “DIY home improvement”, for example. But overall, wherever there is a topic of general interest, people are Googling it. (Binging it? Nah…)
So by all means, build a community online - just don’t drop your SEO. Your dependency on search traffic won’t be reduced - you’ll just lose the search traffic.
SEO is a big field, there’s a lot of companies offering you optimization and results, and for every legitimate SEO out there, I’d bet there are another ten SEO consultants who are looking towards Alta Vista to prove results. In short, there is plenty to know about SEO, and plenty that people are getting wrong.
Let’s look at a fictional case study highlighting some of the mistakes “Chow Mein Lo Mein” might make when they implement SEO for their local Chinese eatery.
Keyword Research is, well, key.
Targeting the wrong keywords can lead to an epic SEO failure. Our friends aren’t going to rank for “Chinese Restaurant” over night, they may however be the first local restaurant to bring SEO to their marketing arsenal, and have a much better chance at ranking for “Oxford Street Chinese Restaurant” or “Sushi in Soho”. Don’t try and optimize for products you don’t sell, or keywords that are irrelevant.
Pretty Pictures
Flash and images can be the downfall of your sites SEO success. That Anime splash screen and navigation might look beautiful, but search engines look for text. When “Chow Mein Lo Mein” include pictures on their menus, it’s important to remember the ALT text too. Too many SEO beginners forget about images completely.
Domain
If you’re registering a new domain and starting SEO from scratch, think of keywords at this point. There’s quite a strong chance that your company name is recognized not at this point. That catchy abbreviation that friends and family love will be lost on your potential clients, and damage your SEO potential. Avoid a .info or .biz and stick to the traditional TLD’s. The SEO benefit here has been debated many a time, but you’re clients will remember a .com or .co.uk more than a less conventional TLD. Hyphens are bad too, rather than Chow-Mein-Lo-Mein.biz, our friends would be better off registering ChowMeinLoMein.co.uk
Keywords in your URLs
Now that we’re happy with ChowMein.LoMein.co.uk, we have to take a look at the URLs in place for the site. ChowMein.LoMein.co.uk/pageid=24528 isn’t going to rank too well for “Sushi Rolls”, whereas ChowMeinLoMein.co.uk/sushi-menu has more of a chance.
Keyword Stuffing in URLs
Ok, don’t overdo it. I recently reviewed a site that had taken keywords to the extreme to create URL’s along the following lines: ChowMein.LoMein.co.uk/the-best-sushi-in-london-oxford-street-chinese-food-take-away-chinese-menu-london. If I have to explain why this is bad, you probably won’t understand most of this blog post anyway!
Guaranteed Rankings
Anyone promising you that they can make you rank for your term at a specific position is, most likely, lying. Good SEO practice will bring you good SEO results, but no one can promise this family restaurant they reach the top spot.
#1 doesn’t always mean #1
Don’t over focus your goal on rankings and be sure to keep in mind the overall ROI of the campaign. The long term ROI from SEO is much higher than that of PPC. Always remember that you’re not going to get results over night. I’ve seen cases when sites react to SEO in a number of weeks, other times it could take up to six months.
Don’t hire an SEO company just to ignore them!
Perhaps this is the biggest mistake I see in the industry. The owners of ChowMeinLowMein.co.uk want to rank for every term under the sun, but refuse to change their content, URLs or add Title tags. If you’re paying for an SEO team, trust them. If you don’t have the manpower to implement the changes, talk to them about getting them to do it for you.
Page Rank
Google Page Rank is as good as dead. Don’t worry about it. Don’t judge success by it. Judge your success on the number of egg-rolls.
Links
SEO is not link building. Sure, back in the day lots of “Egg Fried Rice” links would mean lots of “Egg Fried Rice” traffic. I would recommend investing strongly in on site implementation and good SEO practices rather than a massive link building budget. If you’re adamant on doing your own thing (see “Don’t ignore your SEO company, above), do it right. Paying $24.99 for “a gazillion manually submitted guaranteed-follow links from genuine sources” promised to you by a friendly guy on a forum will most likely back fire. It’s generally accepted that a mix of the old and the new will do the trick, check out this post for some some excellent information.
Content and Context Reign
For a long long time, content was king. The throne is now shared by King Context and Queen Content, and together they are doing a great job reigning over SEO land. Our restaurant owners may want to save on their web development budget, but sharing their site with a generic family owned domain could put a dampener on those “London Take Away Egg Fried Rice” rankings. The better the content, and more relevant the context, the more benefit you’ll have from the long tail - but we’ll save that for another blog post.
You can follow Yosef on Twitter @ysilver.
