A lot of time and energy are placed on finding your consumers online and marketing to them. Even more effort is placed on finding them at the moment they are ready to engage with your brand or to make a purchase.
If done properly, you can invest some budget and employ tactics to make such a timely match while still maintaining a favorable ROI.
Having said that, wouldn’t it be nice if your consumers reached out to YOU when they were ready to be sold and bypassed all of the marketing noise and distractions put forth by your competition vying for the same consumer.
It can happen… It does happen… How? Search Engine Optimization!
It can be agreed upon that users who are uncertain about a purchase turn to the web for information. When they do this what do they do first… Do they click a banner ad? No. Do they go to their facebook page and solicit their friends? Perhaps, but not necessarily first and not necessarily as the final decision. So what do they turn to… SEARCH ENGINES. More specifically, Google’s top 10 or 20 search engine results.
While there is no magic formula to appear in Google’s top 10 (unless the formula is cash=placement), there are a number of techniques which you can, and should, employ in all of your web campaigns which can directly impact your ranking.
The first step in developing an SEO strategy is to determine how you want to be found. Use these simple questions to help create your content keyword focus:
- Are you going for a national or local market?
- How would your consumer go about searching for you?
- Is the keyword too broad or have multiple meanings (i.e. books, print, strategy, etc…)
- Is there any space in the market for your keyword – it is easier to break into the top 10 when there are only 500,000 results instead of 50,000,000.
From this you can generate your top 5 or 6 keywords which will become the backbone of your SEO strategy. Once you are armed with your keywords it is time to begin looking at the tactics which have a direct impact on your search ranking.
While the order of importance of these tactics in Google’s algorithm is a mystery second only to the creation of the universe, I have placed them in an order that seems to be the general consensus in the websphere.
Inbound Links – Inbound links from other relevant sites to your website. It is important that these links are relevant and that the text of the link is more than just “click here”. It would be better to hyperlink “click here for great web strategy” than to just hyperlink “click here”
User Experience and Interface Design – While Google doesn’t care how pretty your site is, a better user experience will help users stay on the site longer which Google WILL take notice of. It will also help drive repeat searches and repeat traffic, another plus.
Site Code Architecture - How is your site put together. Do you employ the proper use of meta tags, header tags, alt tags? Is your site coded with DIVS which move the more relevant content to the top of the page? Are you employing a keyword-centric page file naming convention? Are you using bread crumbs as supplemental navigation? Do you have a sitemap and have you submitted it to Google? There are plenty of other examples which fall into this category, but these are just a few (go ahead and Google the rest)
Keywords and Content – This is the measure of the quantity and quality of your site content. Do you have a deep site rich in content with a proper keyword saturation or do you have 5 pages with one paragraph per page? Content is king, so feel free to be verbose, just make sure it is focused on your keywords and well organized and relevant.
While there are no guarantees with SEO, it is an ever moving target, there are also no real additional costs involved in implementing proper search engine optimization techniques – other than the high costs of an SEO expert consultant [see my profile page for contact info 
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So enjoy, and may the #1 ranking come your way.
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Matthew Kapusta is an experienced Digital Strategist and online marketer, he creates multi-channel digital strategies and tactical execution plans that produce measurable results and maintain a favorable ROI across multiple channels.
