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Search_Engine_Optimization_is_not_Marketing
| Search Engine Optimization is not Marketing
One of the account reps is dealing with a client who's
interested in SEO on their site. Niether the rep nor the client
has a firm grasp on exactly what that involved. This is how I
explained it to her:
SEM is search engine marketing. Like any marketing function, it
involves paying for the delivery an advertising message in an
attempt to gain customers to make sales or to promote brand
awareness. You take how much you spend, figure out how many
sales derived from your effort, bump that up against how much
you made, and figure out if that campaign was effective.
Marketing is typically conducted to promote a service or product
that already exists and is immediately available.
SEO doesn't work like that. The best time to optimize your site
is pre-production. Do good SEO as you build your site and you
won't have to do anything more except a tweak here and there
from then on out. It's a lot easier to do SEO up front than go
back and redo it later.
The concern marketers have with SEO (at least the concern
they've expressed to me) is that it's not easily measured and
there's no guarantee. I tell my clients, "Do what I say, and I
guarantee you'll rank higher in 6 months than you do now for the
terms you target." But I can't guarantee number 1 on Google or
any other provider. And SEO provider who does is either a liar
or has a bag of black-hat tricks up their sleeve that are just
as likely to get you banned as ranked.
SEO is not marketing! SEO is building a site so that it's easily
found, crawled, indexed and ranked by the search engines. You
don't see results in a week, or even a month. You can't directly
calculate a return on investment.
If you're thinking about SEO, do a baseline analysis of your
traffic to determine:
1. The average number of unique visitors per day over the last
three months
2. The average number of page views per day over the last three
months
3. Your position in the organic results for they key terms you
want to target in Google, Yahoo, and MSN
Now do your SEO, wait 6 months, and repeat the above. If the
results are the same, or only a little bit above where they
were, then your SEO wasn't effective. But if there's a
significant difference, and you've got a good deal more traffic
than you did before, it probably was.<
About the author:
Dave is a full-time Search Engine Marketing Manager. He also
runs SyteSurge, a web site dedicated to search engine
optimization and Internet marketing.
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