A Fresh Outlook to Alleviate the Confusion of Search
Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization
Introduction
We have several websites that we maintain for ourselves and
clients, so we are barraged with emergency notices from vendors that this
website or that one is in need of SEO. And from
their perspective, yes, they could use some; however, we think about more than
the search result ranking when it comes to our sites. Result Ranking is highly
weighted as one of the more important desired outcomes, which is why SEM & SEO are the
current trends in strategic marketing. We prize their value as well, but we use
these techniques as tactical tools, not strategically.
Strategic & Tactical Marketing Considerations
When you design and implement your marketing plan, the first
thing you must decide is what you are selling. Most of us are selling goods,
services, or both. This is critical to ascertain, especially with regards to
the idea of Search Engine Results Rankings and clicks on your website. Just a
mere “click” on a website can become a
product if you can cause an enormous number of clicks to happen in a
short period of time, monetizing it through basing your Revenue Stream on
traditional Advertising Models, certain number of impressions (=clicks) equals
a particular cost to the advertiser. In this Advertising Model, as with a magazine’s
circulation, what economically matters is the number-of-eyeballs on an ad. Here
your objectives are to get any click on your page from anyone, stay
for a certain amount of time, and that is it. This subordinates your content to
bait-on-a-hook status where you do not care what your content is or what it says,
just as long as it relevant enough to get a click.
Relevant enough? For what? Enough for the search engines to
determine whether or not to put it at the top of the Organic Results for any
reason and for anyone. Huffington Post is a
good example of this. They create little of their own source content, but they
are master curators of others’ content. To them, it does not matter that someone
with or without cancer clicks on an abstract of a currently circulating
article/subject on, say, some new research and product that helps. They
delivered their value proposition to their customer segment when the page was
clicked-on or a sponsored ad was clicked-through. This is SEM & SEO on
steroids, and a business model in and of itself.
Wrap-up
The following posts will not be about the strategic seo gaming, although some of it is necessary and
helpful. We will explore the business owners’ opportunities to seize control of
their own business marketing and have the marketing investment dollar return
ten-fold in new access to the targeted customer segments.
In simple terms, if you are a Locksmith with a shop in Long
Beach and take great pride in your 24-7 Emergency Services within a 25-mile
radius. Unless you have invented a new bullet-proof locking mechanism that you want
to sell to anyone, your primary revenue streams lie within your 25-miles service
area. You only deliver your value proposition when you make that service call
or counter sale at the shop. So do not pay for advertising, marketing and
promotions dollar for anything outside your territory. If you are good and
authoritative, you will earn that fame just by being dynamite in your own
market.
So next time, we will talk about drilling down to what it is
that you do or what your product does and your strategic marketing plan. We will
start by clearly identifying what you do that directly benefits your customer
segment(s).
Be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed for more installments
of this post and other good stuff.
