Visibility (Branding)

Many consumers assume that top placement in search engines is like a stamp of approval on a brand. Surely a company could not rank highly in search results if it were not one of the best in its field, right?

If you are an experienced search engine user, you probably recognize that the preceding statement is not always true. However, the fact is that many consumers, and even sophisticated web searchers, interpret high search rankings as an implicit brand endorsement.

Therefore, for critical brand terms, an SEO strategy should be geared toward increasing organic search exposure for branded keywords.

In addition to targeting brand terms, you will want to rank well for nonbranded search terms that are specific to your core business (a highly competitive, but highly rewarding, branding effort). When searchers see you ranking highly on these types of search terms, they will associate your brand with the product or service and assume you are one of the best places to purchase from.

The list of situations where the brand can also limit the SEO strategy is quite long, and the opposite can happen too, where the nature of the brand makes a particular SEO strategy pretty compelling. Ultimately, your goal is to dovetail SEO efforts with branding as seamlessly as possible.

Website Traffic

Long gone are the days of a “build it and they will come” paradigm online. Today’s search environment is highly competitive, and you need great SEO to capture targeted, high-quality traffic to your site.

While a business that engages with many of its customers through offline channels can drive traffic by telling those customers to visit its website, SEO fills the different, more critical role of bringing new prospects to your website from an audience of people who might not otherwise have been interested in, or perhaps even aware of, your business at all.

Experienced SEO professionals understand that users search for products, services, and information using an extraordinarily wide variety of search queries and query types. Developing an SEO strategy involves performing extensive keyword research (which we will discuss in Chapter 5) to determine which search queries people actually use. For example, when interested in purchasing a fuel-efficient car, a searcher might type in hybrid efficient cars. In this instance, the search marketing manager for a manufacturer of electric cars might be interested in search exposure for this traffic, even though technically, electric cars was not in the original search query.

Some users may not even know that a company specializing in a specific type of product exists until they perform that search. Or, if they have at one time learned about such a manufacturer, they might not remember enough about it to seek out the manufacturer’s website directly.

Capturing that traffic could provide the manufacturer with incremental sales of its electric vehicles that it probably would not have gotten otherwise. Knowing these factors, the SEO process involves developing a site architecture strategy (see Chapter 6) and a content development/editorial strategy (Chapter 7) to help the site’s pages achieve competitive search engine exposure for a broad range of potentially relevant terms.

High Return on Investment

Increasing online visibility and driving targeted traffic are the first steps to success with SEO. The next step is measuring the performance of that traffic to determine whether the overall website and business objectives are being achieved. This is an ongoing, iterative process that will always accompany all marketing efforts, and SEO is no exception. For most organizations, goals are defined as generating sales, leads, or advertising revenue. For others, goals may include promoting a particular message; consuming, sharing, or perhaps creating specific types of content; or gaining simple signups for a newsletter. An important component of SEO is to deliver not just traffic, but targeted traffic that has the potential to convert into these actions. Whether you are selling products and services, advertising for branding value, or trying to promote specific content to the world, a well-designed SEO strategy can result in a very high return on investment (ROI) when contrasted with other methods of marketing.

SEO generally brings a higher ROI when compared to TV, print, and radio advertising campaigns; and while traditional media is not in danger of being replaced by SEO, organic search can provide some high-margin returns that complement and enhance the use of offline media—especially when done properly over the long haul (see Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1. SEO, a high-ROI activity

In addition, a growing number of businesses operate purely online. Some examples of these are LinkedIn, Zappos, Amazon, and eBay.

Business Factors That Impact Your SEO Strategy

Here are some examples of business issues that can impact SEO:

Revenue and business models

The effective SEO strategy takes into account the purpose of the site—whether it is to sell products, sell advertising, obtain leads, or gain membership signups. We will discuss this more in the later sections of this chapter.

Target customers

Who are you trying to reach? This could be an age group, a gender group, or as specific as people looking to buy a house within a specific neighborhood of San Francisco, California.

Competitors

The competitive landscape is another big factor in your overall strategy. Competition may be strongly entrenched in one portion of the market online, and it may make sense to focus on a different segment. Or you may be the current leader in your market and want to protect this position while continuing to build your customer base.

Branding goals

There may be search terms for which it is critical that you have top search exposure, for branding reasons.

Content development

An important part of SEO and general online success is the creation and optimization of high-quality content for your users. For most businesses, your capacity to create quality content on an ongoing basis can significantly improve your SEO efforts, both from a content-availability perspective (more content in the search engines) and from a user engagement and link development perspective (great content breeds great links and social sharing, both of which can positively influence SEO).

How people search for products like yours

Understanding what customers do when they are searching for products or services like yours is one of the most basic functions of SEO, which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 5. This involves mapping the actual search queries your target customers use when they go to a search engine.

Mapping Your Products and Services

Successful SEO requires a thorough understanding of your business. What products, services, and types of information and resources do you have to offer your site visitors and potential customers?

As we outlined in the preceding section, a critical component of SEO is understanding who is searching for what you are trying to promote, and this requires thoroughly understanding all aspects of your offering. You will need to understand both the broad and specific market categories that your products fall into, as each of these categories might relate to sections of your website that you will likely need to create. By having content areas of the site for those categories, you create the opportunity to obtain organic search traffic related to those categories.

You also should consider business development and the company’s expansion strategy at the outset of the SEO planning process. Consider Amazon, which began as a bookseller but has evolved into a general-purpose e-tailer; sites that go through these types of changes may need to be substantially restructured, and such restructurings can be a source of major SEO headaches. Anticipating and planning for these types of changes in advance provides the opportunity to identify and execute appropriate architectural approaches to developing and optimizing the site.

Understanding That Content Is King

It has been debated since the late 1990s: whether content is king in SEO. Not only is content king for SEO purposes, but as the main driver of engagement on the Web, it is also one of the most important elements of any online effort. Development of high-quality, engaging content for your users increases the available real estate for organic search queries; provides your users reason to enjoy your site and compels them to become customers; and invites promotion and exposure through users sharing your content online, on social media platforms and via direct links from other websites. Determining your available content assets is the first step toward leveraging them within the context of SEO. You may have a deep library of “how to” content, great testimonial or product demonstration videos, a unique photo gallery, or an awesome tool that people are interested in using. All of these content types can be invaluable in building a world-class website that does well in both search engines and the overall web ecosystem.

The content you have available to you will also affect your keyword research and your site architecture, as your content is the major source of information that search engines use to determine what your site is about. As we discussed in “Algorithm-Based Ranking Systems: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking”, you need relevant content to even be “in the game” in search (i.e., if someone searches for hybrid efficient cars and you don’t have any content related to hybrid efficient cars, chances are good that you won’t rank for that search query).

As we will discuss in Chapter 7, on-site content also affects content marketing and link development. Content marketing can be very similar to PR in that the success of your efforts is integrally related to what you are promoting (i.e., what type of content, and of what quality, are you hoping others will link to?).

Consider Site A, a site that has built a substantial, well-researched and well-written set of articles on a specific topic. However, 20 other sites out there have equally substantial sets of articles on the same topic, and many of these other sites have been in the major search engine indexes for much longer than Site A.

Site A has a content quality concern—namely, why would someone link to its articles over the articles from any of the other 20 websites? There is nothing new there. Chances are that Site A will succeed in getting some links to its articles; however, it will likely never be able to establish itself as a leader if it has nothing new or unique to offer.

To establish itself as a leader, Site A must create fresh, unique, engaging content that differentiates the site from its competitors. Perhaps it can offer a solution to a problem that no one else has been able to solve before, or perhaps it focuses on a specific vertical niche and establishes itself as a leader in that niche—for example, by being the first to release a high-quality video series on the topic it covers.

One of the most important decisions Site A’s leadership needs to make is where and how they are going to establish themselves as an authoritative resource in their industry. If they plan to make their website a major player in capturing market-related search engine traffic, this is not an optional step.

When looking at content plans and hopefully establishing an editorial calendar, it is critical to consider not only what you already have, but also what you could develop. This, of course, relates to budget. A publisher with no budget to spend on content development has few choices that she can make in her SEO strategy, whereas another publisher who has a team of in-house content developers has a myriad of options.

Segmenting Your Site’s Audience

Let’s not forget the audience! It is important for the SEO practitioner to understand the target audience. For example, Site A may be a website that sells sneakers. As a result, the site’s developers go out and implement a brilliant campaign to rank for the “sneaker” terms they consider relevant. Being young and energetic, they focus on the way their peers search for sneakers—but what if the target audience for the sneakers Site A sells are age 50 or older? This segmentation goes to the very core of deciding what pages to create on your site, and what content to put on them.

The target audience for Site A (the over-50 crowd) may use different search terms than the younger generation to search for sneakers, which means Site A may well be bringing in search traffic from people who are not interested in its products, and not bringing in traffic from those who might be! For example, Skechers, a California-based shoe company, made the business decision to pivot from being a youth brand to targeting an older demographic with their shoes—so an SEO strategy for selling Skechers sneakers at this stage, then, would be very different from an SEO strategy for the more youth-oriented Nike sneakers.

Similar things can happen with gender, as women and men may not search for their shoes the same way. Figure 3-2 lists the top shoe-related search terms from Wordtracker for searches related to womens shoes and mens shoes.

Figure 3-2. Keyword search term variation examples by gender

As you can see in the figure, search terms used can vary significantly by gender.

Another major element to consider might be location. Searchers in Austin, Texas, may want a different version of your product than searchers in Chicago, Illinois. For that matter, because they want different products and are in different regions, they may be looking for something specific to their region and may use different vernacular—all factors that influence a user’s choice of search terms. Understanding these variables and identifying appropriate traffic targets requires extensive keyword research—yet another critical aspect of the SEO process.

Understanding Context: Market Competitiveness

A critical factor to understand before you launch your SEO efforts is the nature of the market in which you are competing. This tells you how competitive the environment is in general, and augmented with additional research, this information can tell you how competitive the SEO environment is specifically. In some markets, natural search is intensively competitive.

Market competitiveness does not mean you should give up on competing, especially if it is already the focus of your business; however, you might choose to focus your SEO efforts on less competitive terms that can still bring you many qualified leads.

To get a very quick read on keyword competitiveness, use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to see what your cost per click (CPC) could be if you bid on your target phrase in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Higher CPC prices in Google AdWords often mean that the terms are more competitive in organic search as well.

Your SEO strategy can also be influenced by your competitors’ strategies, so understanding what they are doing is a critical part of the process for both SEO and business intelligence objectives. There are several scenarios you might encounter:

• The competitor discovers a unique, highly converting set of keywords.

• The competitor discovers a targeted, high-value link from an authoritative source.

• The competitor saturates a market segment, justifying your focus elsewhere.

• Weaknesses appear in the competitor’s strategy, which provide opportunities for exploitation.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competition from an SEO perspective is a significant part of formulating your own SEO strategy. A final note on competitor analysis: be cautious when targeting competitor link strategies, as some of your competitors may be temporarily benefiting from link tactics that will get them penalized by the search engines (or they may already have been!).

SEO tools such as SEMRush and SearchMetrics can provide insight into your competitors’ SEO performance.

SWOT Analysis

Sometimes you need to get back to the basics and carry out a simple evaluation of where you are in the marketplace, as well as where you would like to be; for this, a SWOT analysis is a great starting point. It creates a grid from which to work and is very simple to execute.

As you can see from the SWOT chart in Figure 3-3, strengths and weaknesses usually stem from internal (on-site, business operational, business resource) sources, whereas opportunities and threats are from external sources.

Figure 3-3. Example SWOT chart

Where does SEO fit in here? To explore this, we’ll use an example. Take Business X. It has a website that was built on WordPress, makes use of category tagging, adds at least one page of content every two days, and has excellent knowledge of its industry. Its domain name isn’t ideal—Businessnameandkeyword.com—but it is decent.

Business X does not get much traffic from search engines, but its rival, Business Y, does because Business Y has had its website up for a long period of time and received some great links along the way. Business Y doesn’t have any SEO plan and relies on its main page to bring in all of its search traffic. This is because Business Y has a keyword-rich domain name and people have used those keywords in their links to Business Y’s website (giving it keyword-rich anchor text), and because of its longevity on the Web.

There aren’t a lot of target search queries; in fact, there are fewer than 50,000 searches per month for the core set of keywords. Business X’s site ranks on the second page of Google results, whereas Business Y is ranked #3, with Wikipedia and About.com taking up the top two positions.

Neither of the businesses is spending money on PPC (paid search) traffic, and the niche doesn’t have much room for other entrants (there may be 10–15 competitors). Both sites have similar link authority in terms of strengths and numbers. The businesses deal in impulse purchases; the products evoke strong emotions.

Figure 3-4 shows what the SWOT for Business X might look like.

Figure 3-4. Sample SWOT chart data for Business X

The preceding analysis suggests where Business X can get some quick wins for its site, as well as where the priorities are. It also forms a great starting point for a long-term strategy and tactical maneuvers. This example is simplistic, but it illustrates how instructive a fleshed-out SWOT can be. It does require you to have analyzed your site, your main competitor(s), your target keywords, and the SERPs.

SWOT Guidelines

Identifying strengths is typically one of the easier objectives:

• What sources of traffic are working well (converting on established site goals) for your site/business?

• Which projects/properties/partnerships are driving positive momentum toward traffic/revenue goals?

• Which of your content sections/types produces high traffic, conversions, and ROI?

• What changes have you made historically that produced significant value?

Determining the weaknesses can be tougher (and requires emotional separation from the data):

• What content is currently driving low levels of search/visitor traffic?

• Which changes that were intended to produce positive results have shown little or no value?

• Which traffic sources are underperforming or underdelivering?

• What projects/properties/partnerships are being leveraged poorly, or not at all?

Parsing opportunities requires a combination of strength and weakness analysis. You want to find areas that are doing well but have room to expand, as well as those that have yet to be explored:

• What brainstormed but undeveloped or untested projects/ideas can have a significant, positive impact?

• What traffic sources currently sending good-quality traffic could be expanded to provide more value?

• What areas of weakness have direct paths to recovery?

• Which website changes have had positive results? Can these be applied more rigorously or to other areas for increased benefit?

• What new markets or new content areas are potentially viable or valuable for expansion?

• What sources of new content or new links have yet to be tapped?

• What third-party platforms (social media, content curators, etc.) can be utilized to expand reach and increase engagement?

Determining threats can be the most challenging of the tasks. You’ll need to combine creative thinking with an honest assessment of your weaknesses and your competitors’ strengths, and consider the possibilities of macro-events that could shape your website/company’s future:

• In your areas of weakness, which players in your market (or other, similar markets) are strong? How have they accomplished this?

• What shifts in human behavior, web usage, or market conditions could dramatically impact your business/site? (For example, consider the “what if people stopped searching and instead navigated the Web in different ways?” perspective. It is a bit “pie in the sky,” but we have already seen Craigslist make classifieds obsolete, and have witnessed Facebook start to take advertising market share from the search engines.)

• Which competitors have had the most success in your arena? How have they accomplished this? Where do they intersect with your business/customers?

• Are there any strategies implemented by startups in similar businesses that have had massive success in a particular arena that could be dangerous to your business if they were replicated in your market?

Conducting SWOT analysis from a web marketing and SEO perspective is certainly one of the most valuable first steps you can take as an organization poised to expend resources. If you haven’t taken the time to analyze the landscape from these bird’s-eye-view perspectives, you might end up like a great runner who’s simply gone off the course—sure, you’ll finish fast, but where will it take you?

SMART Objectives

Every company is unique, so naturally its challenges are unique. Even a second SEO initiative within the same company will not be the same as the first. Your first SEO efforts will have changed things, creating new benchmarks, new expectations, and different objectives. Thus, each SEO effort is a new endeavor.

One way to start a new project is to set SMART objectives. Let’s look at how to go about doing that in the world of SEO.

Specific objectives are important. It is easy to get caught up in the details of the plan and lose sight of the broader site objectives. You may think you want to rank #1 for this phrase or that, but in reality what you want is more granular than that: more leads, more page views, more customers. Perhaps you don’t even need more customers from organic search, but you want higher sales volumes, so in fact having the same number of orders but with a higher average order value would meet your objectives better.

Measurable objectives are essential if you are to manage the performance in meeting them—you can’t manage what you can’t measure. SEO practitioners have to help their clients or organizations come to grips with analytics, and not just the analytics software, but the actual processes of how to gather the data, how to sort it, and most importantly, how to use it to make informed decisions.

Achievable objectives are ones that can be accomplished with the available resources. You could decide to put a man on Mars next year, for example, but it is just too big an undertaking to be feasible. You can be ambitious, but it is important to pick goals that can be met. You cannot possibly sell to more people than exist in your market. There are limits to markets, and at a certain point the only growth can come from opening new markets, or developing new products for the existing market.

Aside from basic business achievability, there are also limits to what can rank at #1 for a given search query. The search engines want the #1 result to be the one that offers the most value for users, and unless you are close to having the website that offers the most value to users, it may be unreasonable to expect to get to that position, or to maintain it if you succeed in getting there.

Realistic objectives are about context and resources. It may be perfectly achievable to meet a certain objective, but only with greater resources than may be presently available. Even a top ranking on the most competitive terms around is achievable for a relevant product, but it is a realistic goal only if the resources required for such an effort are available.

Timelined objectives are the final part of the SMART methodology. If there is no timeline, no project can ever fail, because it can’t run out of time. SEO generally tends to take longer to implement and gather momentum than a paid search advertising campaign. It is important that you set milestones and deadlines so that you can manage expectations and course-correct.

“We want to rank at #1 for loans” is not a SMART objective. It doesn’t identify the specific reason why the company thinks a #1 ranking will help it. It doesn’t have a timeline, so there is no way to fail. It doesn’t state an engine on which to be #1, so there’s a guaranteed argument if the intention is to rank well on both Google and Bing, but the result is only high rankings on Bing.

“We want to increase approved loan applications generated by organic search by 30% over six months” is a far better objective. There is a deadline, and the company can certainly gauge progress toward the specific objective. The company can look at its current market share and the resources committed to see whether this is an achievable and realistic goal.