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Optimizing Optimization
June 22, 2007

This week, we have been looking at search marketing and search engine optimization. Entire books and conferences have been devoted to these topics, but the salient points can be broken down into a few key issues:

Understand your market. The key to any marketing strategy, whether it’s SEO or anything else, is to understand the market your company is in. How do your prospective customers search for information? What keywords are they likely to use? How fine and granular are their searches likely to be? Do they search for broad topics or intensely specific terms? Once you answer these questions, you can tailor your SEO strategy appropriately. Will simple title tags and basic keywords suffice, or do you need to buy a thesaurus to generate every possible keyword or phrase? In many cases, the former may be all you need.

Understand your Web site. Is your Web site in general effectively marketing your company? If not, then all the SEO in the world won’t help. Reevaluate your Web strategy in general—especially if it’s time for a redesign—and at the same time evaluate your SEO needs, desires, and priorities. Do you use an effective content management system (CMS)? Would upgrading your CMS do the job?

Know when to outsource and when to not. There are companies and consultants that specialize in helping others with SEO. Would it be to your best advantage to hire the help you need or is your own staff up to the task? What would be the most cost-effective path to take? Once you have evaluated your specific SEO needs and priorities, you can better determine if you need to go to the expense of outsourcing.

Decide whether you even need SEO. After all, the point of SEO is to drive traffic to your site. If there are other cost-effective means at your disposal for generating site traffic—i.e., direct mail, e-mail blasts, catalogs, print or Web advertising, etc. etc.—then if you don’t optimize your site, you’re not going to be frogmarched into the street. Remember that SEO is just one element of a marketing strategy. It may not be right for everyone; like any marketing strategy, the specific implementation will vary from company to company.

Posted by Richard Romano on June 22, 2007 | Comments (0)