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What’s It All Mean?
Commitment: Every successful project has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can damage everything.
Planning: Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed. Search marketing is no different.
Product/Service: Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. Nothing can replace the real quality.
Education/Information: You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.
Patience: True, there are exceptions every time, but for the vast majority of companies, search marketing is a process that takes a time to implement correctly. There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.
Design & Usability: Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a website that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.
Keyword Research: If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.
Analytics: How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? The measure, analyze, and adjust strategies and tactics as needed.
Tools: Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.
Crawlability: A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML, and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc.
Content: This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting more visitors and ultimately more customers.
Links: Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.
Social/Local Findability: Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, and social media works, as well. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is to find ability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible, and you can do this on social media sites that make local networking easier.
Reputation Management: It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.
Trust: I said earlier that trust is the No. 1 factor and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success.
As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be a one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.
