By Aaron Shear , May 6, 2008
Over the past seven years, I have heard executive managers say over and over again that search engine optimization (SEO) is voodoo or black magic, and it will never work. This refrain comes from large corporations that often spend millions of dollars on traditional marketing and public relations. Yet, most traditional marketing and public relations programs do not drive an instant return on investment (ROI).
The best way around this obstacle is to get full buy-in from the client's marketing and public relations teams. Once you have these teams on your side, you can start approaching senior management. You can start with a paid search campaign for instant results, proving the basic concept that search drives traffic and ROI. Below are some tools that can help provide the data you need to convince senior managers of the value of search marketing.
Hopefully, all goes well, and you get your funding for this pivotal test. It helps to communicate that phase two and three will include an increase in budget for paid search and an investment in a search engine optimization program.
There are several ways to approach the above testing strategy. One way would be to hire an experienced in-house search optimizer with at least three years experience and a proven track record. It is important to consider that this is a new field, and experienced search optimizers are hard to find. Your job requisition could be open for at least six to nine months, and that's if you are lucky.
Another approach would be to bring in a full-service SEO firm to handle everything for you. The risk here is you could wind up getting the junior new guy who is going to learn by experimenting with your site.
A third option would be to hire a consultant who can come in and design a custom strategy for your site. Most consultants will teach you everything you need to know to be self-sufficient. You can usually keep such consultants on retainer for asking questions as time goes on and things change.
Keep in mind that your optimization strategy should always revolve around analytics and traffic levels. Take some time to understand the concept of long tail keywords. If you focus solely on head-based keywords, your strategy is likely to fail. The quality of your content will make or break your site; poor content does not drive a tremendous amount of link popularity, which is a key factor in your SEO strategy.
Besides the above testing strategy, it helps to be well informed on search engine marketing. You can keep abreast of the search industry in various ways.
With this in mind, you are off to a great start. Remember, convincing the executive team to invest in search will not be easy. They will likely shoot this down the first time you ask. Keep gathering more data and get support from other departments to help your cause. This is a team battle and needs to be defended on all fronts.
Aaron is off this week. Today's column ran earlier on Search Engine Watch.