Building a Marketing Driven SEO Strategy

We are all competing for what it seems is like the same space to get our message out there. People are inundated with marketing messages and pitches to take action. Almost all of those messages include a web site address. This is a form of outbound marketing, like cold calls or sales letters. What many people are looking to do which is low cost is get found on the web better so people get to their web site and take action. However, if you don’t have a marketing driven search engine optimization strategy, people will never find you. Many people start out with search engine optimization not knowing where to start. The conventional SEO strategy looks like this:

• Research keywords
• Optimize site for those keywords
• Link internal pages using keyword loaded terms
• Get links from other sites with keywords in the link

These days, this strategy isn’t working as like it used to and people need to start realizing that if a web site is not genuinely interesting and is not worth remarking upon, it can be nearly impossible to get links, attention and rankings.

Following the Rules of Marketing

In order to clear the decks and hit the reset button we will need to build a marketing drive SEO strategy. That requires us to actually follow the rules of marketing to make it work. Start with a market analysis. You have to ask three primary questions -

• What does the consumer need?
• How many consumer need this product/service?
• What is the buying process?

In order for SEO to work well, a product or service must be designed with a clear audience in mind. The beauty of this is you can figure out if there is a market, and what that market demands, test that market, and then build a site to cater to that market. You can do this quickly and cheaply, using search marketing.

Next you need to do some competitive research. Query the search engine results pages under the keywords you want to rank for and pick out the top ten sites in your niche. You will need to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competition as well as determine the strengths and weaknesses of your own site, relative to the competition.

Now you will need to start positioning yourself through campaigns and testing them out. SEOBook has a great set of steps to do position testing:

Undertake keyword research

Look for a niche that is “worth remarking upon” and is new, or doesn’t have a lot of existing competition

Select a brand name and domain name the describes the niche ie. SEOBook.com. It is useful to include a keyword term

Build a site that focuses exclusively on this niche, and no others.

Conduct SEO campaign

Monitor results.

If you aim to be the first in the customers mind when they think of a keyword term, you can easily win the ranking game. What do you think of when someone mentions the name “Google”? Search, right. How about IBM? Computers. Hewlett Packard? Printers.

When you are ready you will need to take this niche you have selected for bit of a causal test drive around the block.

So when you evaluate the competitors in your niche, also consider how difficult it will be for followers to compete with you.

Executing the SEO Strategy

In the same article, SEOBook has a great check list to try things out and execute the strategy. Here they are:

Build content. Get a list of 50 keywords and write a page on each. Include how-to’s, generalist information, news (use Blog software), video, photos and maps. Tag all graphical content with keyword terms

Write naturally, stay on a single topic per page. Forget keyword density, it is overrated

Layout the site by placing most important (money) pages at the top of the hierarchy, one step away from the home page

Create a Google Site Map to ensure crawlability

Once the site is complete, submit to the top directories. We recommend Yahoo!,BOTW, and Business.com

Issue a press release. Ensure you include a link back to your site.

Open Twitter and Facebook accounts, and update each time you add a page of content

Add one new page of quality content to the site per day

After 30 days, examine your stats. Look for long tail keyword terms, choose the most popular term, and write a page about it. Use this list of long tail keywords as article starter ideas

Every 15 days, do the same thing again

Remember to write a new page of quality content every day

Find the top ten sites in closely related niches, and offer to write articles for them. Include a link back to your site

They say and after doing this myself with some other sites and after six months, you should be ranking well, and your traffic should be moving in an upward trajectory.

If You are Looking for Help from an SEO Marketing Firm

We can’t do it all and when we are a small business, we might try and do it all but we need to learn the hard way that it is best to find the expert for something and hire them to do it. In this case, you should be looking for a online marketing provider that provides SEO services. Here is some great advice from SmallBizTrends on what to look for:

Analyze your web site. The basis of SEO starts with your web site. Like a doctor who should ask questions and do some tests before making a diagnosis, your SEO company should start by examining your web site.They should look at factors such as: the URL structure, your title and Meta tags, page content, and how you link pages of your site to each other. The more complex your web site, the more thorough the analysis should be. This is where advanced SEO knowledge is crucial. Minor changes can have a big impact.

Identify keywords. Keywords are words that people type into search engines to find web pages. For most, they already rank well for the name of their business. To attract new business, they also need to rank well for other terms. Where your web page shows up in the list is your ranking – and getting on the first page can mean a lot more business than being lower on the list.Keywords and content are the foundation of a well-optimized web site. Your SEO company should see where you currently rank for relevant keywords. They should give the approximate demand and competition for various words (usually phrases) that are important to your business.If your business is a local business, your SEO company should focus on local terms by adding state or city names to keyword phrases you’re targeting. They should be sure that you’re listed correctly on search engine maps like Google Maps because map results show up above the rest of the results.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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