Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix, Part II
by Scott Buresh
This is part
two of the article Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix. Read
Part 1.
Leveraging
Your Assets
Search engine
optimization is not something that should be done in a vacuum if you wish to
achieve optimal results, nor is it a discipline in which it is necessary to
start from scratch. Many of the pieces necessary for a successful SEO campaign
are already in place – it is simply a matter of identifying them and
using them (and your search engine optimization company) to their full potential.
Your
People
While your
search engine optimization company should take the time to understand
everything that it possibly can about your business before embarking on your
SEO campaign, nobody will ever understand your business better than you and
your colleagues. This is why it is important for your search engine
optimization company to help you to utilize key people that are vital to the
success of the initiative, including people outside the marketing department.
Sales
Salespeople are
the front line of your organization – the people who know how to talk to
your prospects and understand what is involved in their decision making
processes. When it comes to collaborating with your search engine optimization
company on keyphrase selection (finding the phrases that will bring
highly-motivated prospects to your site), your sales staff can be invaluable.
Many companies have names for products or services that are very popular
internally but very rarely used on the street, so targeting these phrases
during your SEO campaign will not bring you the type of traffic that you seek.
Your salespeople (at least the good ones) know how your prospects speak in the
real world. A good search engine optimization company will help you to utilize
your sales staff – and ensure they feel involved and enthusiastic about
the SEO campaign in the process.
Customers
Customers can
also be invaluable when it comes to selecting the keyphrases to target for your
SEO campaign. Many companies are surprised when they enlist the help of a
search engine optimization company to begin a campaign only to discover that
their customers do not speak the same language that they do. This is common
across just about every industry – most people are very intimately
involved in their industries and use proprietary names, acronyms, and other
verbiage that is, at the least, confusing to an outsider. Anyone who has ever
been dragged along to a work function by a spouse can attest to this – it
often sounds as though the employees are speaking animatedly in a foreign
language, leaving the reluctant spouse to fend for him or herself. In short,
talk to your best customers. Ask them what they would type into a search engine
if they were looking for a company that provided what you offer. You will
almost certainly be surprised by the responses.
Company
Experts
Almost every
company can boast that it has industry experts on staff – the ones who
design products and services, the ones who implement them, etc. Yet very few
companies take advantage of these experts to promote the company as a leader in
their respective fields. Since search engines place a premium on valuable,
educational content, leveraging your company experts to create articles and
whitepapers for your SEO campaign is an excellent way to attain search engine
rankings while also providing something of value to your site visitors. Adding
this type of content throughout your SEO campaign also allows you the luxury of
educating your prospects online so that they will be further down the line in
the sales cycle when they eventually decide to make contact.
Your
Content
Now that you
have learned how to effectively make the best use out of your colleagues, it’s
time to take an inventory of the content that is available to you for your SEO
campaign initiatives. As mentioned previously, valuable content is held in high
regard by engines and visitors alike. Often, however, much of this content
never finds its way to the company website for whatever reason. Your search
engine optimization company should help you to identify this content, which can
include the following:
Whitepapers
Does your
company have whitepapers that are used during presentations, at tradeshows, and
in other areas but that are not available on your website? If so, you are
missing out on a great opportunity to promote your expertise, educate your
prospects, and impress the search engines. Most of these whitepapers can be
optimized during the SEO campaign for maximum search engine benefit with
minimal changes. Even older whitepapers can usually be dusted off by your
search engine optimization company and brought up to date at a fraction of the
effort that would be involved in creating a new one.
Articles
Similar to
whitepapers but typically shorter, articles written by your company experts can
be just as beneficial as whitepapers when added to the company site and for the
same reason. Unless you have signed away the rights to any articles to the
original publishing entity, there is no reason why your search engine
optimization company cannot use them on your website for marketing purposes.
Older articles, like older whitepapers, can typically be updated with minimal
effort.
Press
releases
Your company
press releases can also be optimized and utilized on your website. In fact,
optimizing press releases prior to their distribution on the newswires is also
a good idea. Unlike whitepapers and expert articles, it is usually unnecessary
for your search engine optimization company to go back and update press
releases during the SEO campaign, since they are historical in nature.
Offline
Marketing
Almost every
organization has offline marketing materials that are used at trade shows, in
sales presentations, or in direct mail. Since this material has (usually)
already been vetted by the marketing department, it is usually fit for
consumption by the general public. Often, however, these materials are left to
rot once they have served their offline purpose, when they could easily be
repurposed by your search engine optimization company and used to great effect
on the website. Of course, there may be good reasons for this – you may
not want to give away your best sales pitch to your competitors by making it
public.
Unique
Challenges
Although it is
wise to make the most out of your existing assets when you are launching an SEO
campaign, you should also be aware of some of the unique challenges that are
inherent to the online arena. Keeping these challenges in mind as you begin
your SEO campaign can make a large difference in your results down the road.
Understanding
Searcher Behavior
In marketing, it
is accepted that one must grab the prospect’s attention with a compelling
message in order to maintain his or her interest. On the Internet, this is
paramount. People who are using search engines are, by definition, in a
“searching” mode. While this is of course obvious, it is also
important to remember that in no other form of marketing is it easier for the
searcher to abandon your attempts to attract his or her attention and look
elsewhere. Your competitors are a simple click of the ‘back’ button away. In
fact, a recent study shows that the average visitor to a website stays for less
than three minutes – hardly enough time for him or her to be sold.
Searchers have been conditioned, by the sheer amount of information available,
to be impatient when they do not immediately find what it is they are seeking.
What does this mean? It means that your pages should offer immediate insight on
the common problems that your customers face. If you cannot communicate, within
a few seconds, how you understand your prospect and how you are different from
the myriad of other firms out there, you have lost them, perhaps forever. With
help from your search engine optimization company, take a close look at every
page of your website. Do you focus on the user, or do you focus on your
company? Do you immediately engage your prospects with your knowledge of what
particular business challenges they are facing? If not, it may be time to
rethink the most prominent marketing message on your individual pages and
devise a new action plan for your SEO campaign.
Redefining
“Competition”
Almost every
company has a list of four or five companies that it considers to be its primary
competitors. These are generally the companies that it believes offer products
and services most similar to its own. Often these companies steal employees
from one another, and they seem forever concerned with what the other is doing.
On a search engine,
however, your definition of competition should be broader. It should include any
company that offers the same products or services as your company that outranks
you for important terms. Whether or not these companies are on your
immediate radar is immaterial – a searcher will not know the difference,
nor will he or she care. The Internet is, by and large, a vast and level
playing field. There are quite possibly companies that you have never heard of
using the Internet almost exclusively to promote their brands. It is important
to watch out for these competitors as well as the ones you and your search
engine optimization company currently track.
The Role
of Patience
Unlike with most
marketing channels, search engine optimization has many variables that will be
outside of your control and the benefits will not be immediate. Simply put, it
takes time to properly optimize a website for optimal search engine
performance, and there are no guarantees as to when the engines will re-visit
your site and reward you for the efforts of your SEO campaign (although, if you
select the right search engine optimization company and play your cards right,
it will happen).
The obvious
downside is that an SEO campaign can take time before you begin to see your
ROI, and unlike most other forms of traditional marketing, the timing can vary
greatly. The upside, which people who successfully engage in an SEO campaign
realize, is that the ROI is typically much greater than other forms of
marketing (refer to the chart above). It
is also important to remember that working with a search engine optimization
company is a longer-term investment, which, like other longer-term investments,
takes time to mature. If you spend marketing dollars on a print ad, that ad
will only be effective for as long as the publication is in the public eye. If
you buy banner ads or use pay-per-click advertising, your presence will decline
once you stop paying. But a website that’s been properly optimized by a
competent, knowledgeable search engine optimization company will likely bring
you traffic for years to come.
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