SEO- Another Over-Specialization

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something that you hear a lot about and your business may be exploring or have already begun to tackle in some form. My goal in this blog is to demystify some of the jargon and technical black magic that is part of the SEO techno-swirl.

We live in the era of the specialist, with special knowledge and special skills. If you don’t believe that, just ask a specialist, they’ll tell you. What is a specialist? Someone who knows more about a particular subject than you do. Let’s boil this down to something we can all understand and therefore have some control over. Why? Because as it pertains to one specific area like search engine optimization, the more you know the better.

SEO is an area tailor made for over-specialization because it involves things that most small businesses don’t spend a lot of time on. You have a website, but need to plug it into the world of search engines and then translate that somehow into tangible interest in your products and services- leads as we still call them.

You can exert a lot of control by understanding those core areas:

• website or web presence
• search engines
• what you do with the results

However, the most important questions you need to ask yourself are:

• Do I need this to help grow my business?
• Am I starting in the right place?
• Am I prepared to turn the results into potential customers?

This is how you gain control over the specialists. Those questions will make the difference between failure and success and most importantly you own the questions therefore you own the answers (and you control what you own). Those questions should form the strategy for implementing successful revenue generation through website and search engine optimization. We’ll break it down this way:

Website

We look at hundreds of websites every week. Most often, we see websites in only two categories- drastically inadequate or drastically overbuilt. Because we know what a lot of people charge to create or rebuild websites, overbuilt is usually worse than inadequate. Is there anything wrong with having a website that’s just right? Apparently, everyone thinks so.

A new website should be designed with two things in mind, customers and SEO. You have to serve both to be successful in driving revenue. No one is going to spend an hour reading a particularly wordy website but many of those same words are critically important to whether you even show up when that same person does a Google search. That’s why just “hooking up” an existing website to search engines often doesn’t produce the desired results.

Anyone who works with your website and SEO should be able to explain in plain terms what they are doing and should be able to translate your objectives into a strategy that is clearly defined and easily understood. The technical part of the strategy should define things like what parts of your website work and don’t work with SEO and what needs to be done to make the site as a whole more SEO friendly. In addition, there should be a process showing how keyword campaigns are created and monitored and how this information will be used to determine effectiveness. The other part of the strategy is the process by which leads generated from your website are qualified and turned into opportunities for business. This is somewhat of an oversimplification but it’s a good place to start.

Search Engines

Understanding what the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use to determine where your site shows up in their search results is part of the foundation of SEO. Knowing what they value and are looking for can provide some guidelines for what you need to do to make your site show up higher on the list. There are things you can do to your site to make them more search engine friendly and to provide the right matching keywords for your subject matter.

In a nutshell, what the search engines are trying to do in their ranking algorithms is to figure out which sites are the most relevant to the keyword or phrase that is being searched. Those sites with lots of traffic due to inbound links from other highly trafficked sites are a strong indicator that others value this site, and of course, the relevancy of the content that matches the search plays a strong part in this as well.

Of course, some clever yet devious individuals have found ways to spoof some of the qualities that the search engines value and essentially trick them into giving you a higher ranking. Because cheating always catches up to you, this type of trickery termed “black hat SEO” is to be avoided. Consequences can include being delisted so your site doesn’t even show up. Educating yourself on the high-level elements of SEO and how search engines work will help protect you from unscrupulous individuals claiming to provide you with #1 ranking on Google for your search terms. (You probably got one of those spam emails while you were reading this).

Results

When people land on your website from the searches, you must not force them to read too much or click too much in order to contact you, unless you transact business directly from your site and therefore really don’t like talking to your customers much anyway.

From a management perspective, inbound calls, emails and contact forms must be the start of your sales process. I have worked with countless companies whose most critical customer data is buried in dozens of Outlook folders on dozens of unconnected computers. This information should be visible to everyone who cares.

You must turn these leads into dollars or there is no return on your time and money investment in any of this. Remember, the technoids that tell you they can hook your website up to all the search engines and do all kinds of really cool stuff are not responsible for turning leads into dollars, that’s you. So they can declare victory because more people are hitting you site even if there is no verifiable increase in number of customers, profit, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully from this brief overview you understand that this is much more a management issue than a technical one. Whatever you do, do not separate this into fractured parts that never serve the ultimate purpose- customers and profits. We do not recommend outsourcing any of this until you have a sound strategy that controls the technical and the sales aspects.

Comments

[Paul G.]

I agree with most of what you are saying. And I get the spam email almost daily fron the seo spammers. Some are really cheezy.