I’m starting to feel like search engine optimization should be re-labeled again. Real search engine optimization rarely makes any more headlines. The basic processes have been grilled into virtually every corporate and startup by now. People know they should be chasing keywords, populating their Websites with tons of unique content, begging for links from every link-friendly resource, and second-guessing their analytics on a daily basis about why search referral traffic is going up or down.
That’s search engine optimization, right?
So, Where Exactly Is the Optimization in Search Marketing?
A forum moderator recently pointed out to someone that if the search results they are producing are not optimum (the best under whatever circumstances the marketer was laboring), then they hardly claim to be optimizing.
You don’t achieve optimal performance by doing the same thing everyone else is. That is SEO boot camp stuff. Optimization comes after you master the basics but many companies are now retrenching on their search optimization strategies out of fear.
Or, worse, they are trying to do more of the same in the misguided notion that if they paddle faster the boat won’t continue sliding toward the falls.
Search engine optimization does not lead your Website to be penalized or downgraded. If your site lost traffic to Panda or Penguin, you were NOT doing SEO. You can call it that if you wish, but optimal performance does not fail due to violations of search engine guidelines (it can fail for other reasons — none of which apply in your cases).
Search Engine Optimization is About Marketing
There is no search engine optimization without marketing. Chasing keywords is NOT marketing. Publishing content is NOT marketing. Obtaining links is NOT marketing.
Why do you focus on keywords in a spreadsheet? What is their purpose? Just because some “SEO tool” tells you there are 6,000 keywords with traffic relevant to your site doesn’t mean squat. If you mention tuna fish in a metaphorical expression you just made your site relevant to hundreds of fishing expressions, sandwich expressions, sushi expressions, etc. It’s a darned shame you were just writing a blog post about marketing and happened to mention Tuna Fish a couple of times.
Metaphors change everything. Relevance is not defined or determined by matching keywords in a spreadsheet to keyword suggestion tools. The relevance computed by a search engine may not be helpful but it’s trying to match queries to Websites that have a high probability of meeting the user’s expectations.
So search engine optimization begins with understanding the user market — and I am NOT talking about “personas” or any other SEO flim-flammery you may have read about that borrows terminology from some marketing manual. Your user base is not a persona. If you’re chasing personas you’re carving square blocks out of a round cheese wheel.
Do you understand what my use of a cheese metaphor means for the relevance of this article? It’s not directed at people who want to buy cheese online so any online cheese buying searchers who come here will be disappointed and perhaps even a bit put off. Should I therefore have avoided using a cheese metaphor or talking avoiding talking about people buying cheese online?
Let’s face it — your wimpy little blog isn’t going to get much gratuitous hamburger traffic because you’re too chicken to talk about hamburgers, whether they be big half-pound hamburgers or Wendy’s hamburgers or McDonald’s hamburgers or Burger King hamburgers. While you’re writing mushy corporate voice style pulp fiction for your targeted keywords you’re not paying attention to what your target audience is actually interested in.
The market is NOT and never has been defined by keywords. Especially not by the keywords reported on by SEO tools because they focus on high-volume keywords and do absolutely nothing to match keywords to user interests.
You Need a Market Profile
The first question I ask any client is who is your target audience? To whom are you trying to sell stuff? What are you selling and who is interested in buying that? Okay, that’s more than one question but it takes a few questions to figure out what the market is. You cannot get that from a list of keywords. I’ve had people hand me spreadsheets with 20-30,000 keywords and I was able to decipher absolutely nothing about their target markets.
It doesn’t matter if a keyword gets 18,000 local searches a month if your target audience only uses low-volume queries. Just because YOU think the 18,000 local searches mean something doesn’t mean THEY do.
Search engine optimization fails when the tools make the decisions. There is no optimization in tool-based search marketing. Absolutely none. The marketer has to identify, learn, and understand the users’ dialect — you have to adopt their idiom. Many SEO practitioners know that business owners often speak in a jargon that is obscenely alien to most customers — but in practice the SEO technicians are failing miserably to rein in this unspeakable mindless adoration of the spreadsheet.
\You Need a Content Strategy
Yes, it’s a strategy to say “We’re going to publish 500 articles about air conditioning filters this year” but that’s a horrible strategy. Who cares about 500 articles on the same topic? Online customer interaction is not the same as offline customer interaction where people come into a store and ask the sales clerks the same questions all day long. Those offline conversations can be repeated ad nauseum and hopefully the sales clerks will improve their interaction skills so they close more happy customers.
But in the online world “more of the same” is pretty much the least optimal content strategy. Your content strategy should be a full conversation. 200+ articles about the same government form is not a full conversaton — that’s just someone chasing keywords in a spreadsheet.
Keywords-in-spreadsheets do NOT optimize for search. If they did then Google’s Panda algorithm would not have been effective.
Your content strategy should begin with your value proposition. You don’t want to come up with 20,000 ways of directly pitching your value proposition to customers — you want to come up with an indeterminate thousands of ways of SHOWING your value proposition to people continuously.
Show, don’t tell is far more important to search engine optimization than counting keywords.
Your Links Should Do Something Useful
Too many companies are chasing guest posts and infographics. No one should be doing this because they are only doing it for the sake of obtaining more links.
Getting links is easy. If the links just sit there, however, and don’t actually do anything then they aren’t really links so much as they are artificial signals for the search engines. And artificial signals for search engines are preliminary to earning search engine penalties and downgrades.
If you’re just getting links because you think that is what SEO does, you have a penalty or downgrade in your future. It’s not a matter of IF but of WHEN.
If the links have no value outside the search environment then the search engines won’t want them to have value in the search algorithms. That’s a pretty simple lesson. It should have been learned ten times over by now, but people still don’t get it. The reset in the wake of Penguin is almost complete. Once again the SEO community is starting to share linking tips and resources like there is no end to the opportunities they represent.
How many times do SEO bloggers have to come up looking like incompetent fools before the people they are trying to serve figure out that you guys ain’t got any more clue than the rest of us?
Analytics Have to Be Used to Measure Change
We are not optimizing for search if nothing changes. Search analytics data has to show you where things change so that you can either do more of what works or less of what hurts. If nothing is changing you’re stuck in neutral and not going anywhere.
It is mathematically impossible to maintain any specific level of search referral traffic for an extended period of time. People change the queries they use and over time all query spaces die. So if you’re not tracking change and growing traffic where you have upward trends then you can pretty much expect your stagnant performance to slowly degrade.
Learning how to use the basic tools is only the first step. You also have to learn WHY you use them and WHAT you’re supposed to achieve with them. Chasing keywords and links is not search engine optimization because it is not search engine marketing.
If you don’t build your market and increase your sales and conversions then you need to try something different. More of the same doesn’t cut the mustard if it’s not growing your online business.
By Michael Martinez
http://www.seo-theory.com/
That’s search engine optimization, right?
So, Where Exactly Is the Optimization in Search Marketing?
A forum moderator recently pointed out to someone that if the search results they are producing are not optimum (the best under whatever circumstances the marketer was laboring), then they hardly claim to be optimizing.
You don’t achieve optimal performance by doing the same thing everyone else is. That is SEO boot camp stuff. Optimization comes after you master the basics but many companies are now retrenching on their search optimization strategies out of fear.
Or, worse, they are trying to do more of the same in the misguided notion that if they paddle faster the boat won’t continue sliding toward the falls.
Search engine optimization does not lead your Website to be penalized or downgraded. If your site lost traffic to Panda or Penguin, you were NOT doing SEO. You can call it that if you wish, but optimal performance does not fail due to violations of search engine guidelines (it can fail for other reasons — none of which apply in your cases).
Search Engine Optimization is About Marketing
There is no search engine optimization without marketing. Chasing keywords is NOT marketing. Publishing content is NOT marketing. Obtaining links is NOT marketing.
Why do you focus on keywords in a spreadsheet? What is their purpose? Just because some “SEO tool” tells you there are 6,000 keywords with traffic relevant to your site doesn’t mean squat. If you mention tuna fish in a metaphorical expression you just made your site relevant to hundreds of fishing expressions, sandwich expressions, sushi expressions, etc. It’s a darned shame you were just writing a blog post about marketing and happened to mention Tuna Fish a couple of times.
Metaphors change everything. Relevance is not defined or determined by matching keywords in a spreadsheet to keyword suggestion tools. The relevance computed by a search engine may not be helpful but it’s trying to match queries to Websites that have a high probability of meeting the user’s expectations.
So search engine optimization begins with understanding the user market — and I am NOT talking about “personas” or any other SEO flim-flammery you may have read about that borrows terminology from some marketing manual. Your user base is not a persona. If you’re chasing personas you’re carving square blocks out of a round cheese wheel.
Do you understand what my use of a cheese metaphor means for the relevance of this article? It’s not directed at people who want to buy cheese online so any online cheese buying searchers who come here will be disappointed and perhaps even a bit put off. Should I therefore have avoided using a cheese metaphor or talking avoiding talking about people buying cheese online?
Let’s face it — your wimpy little blog isn’t going to get much gratuitous hamburger traffic because you’re too chicken to talk about hamburgers, whether they be big half-pound hamburgers or Wendy’s hamburgers or McDonald’s hamburgers or Burger King hamburgers. While you’re writing mushy corporate voice style pulp fiction for your targeted keywords you’re not paying attention to what your target audience is actually interested in.
The market is NOT and never has been defined by keywords. Especially not by the keywords reported on by SEO tools because they focus on high-volume keywords and do absolutely nothing to match keywords to user interests.
You Need a Market Profile
The first question I ask any client is who is your target audience? To whom are you trying to sell stuff? What are you selling and who is interested in buying that? Okay, that’s more than one question but it takes a few questions to figure out what the market is. You cannot get that from a list of keywords. I’ve had people hand me spreadsheets with 20-30,000 keywords and I was able to decipher absolutely nothing about their target markets.
It doesn’t matter if a keyword gets 18,000 local searches a month if your target audience only uses low-volume queries. Just because YOU think the 18,000 local searches mean something doesn’t mean THEY do.
Search engine optimization fails when the tools make the decisions. There is no optimization in tool-based search marketing. Absolutely none. The marketer has to identify, learn, and understand the users’ dialect — you have to adopt their idiom. Many SEO practitioners know that business owners often speak in a jargon that is obscenely alien to most customers — but in practice the SEO technicians are failing miserably to rein in this unspeakable mindless adoration of the spreadsheet.
\You Need a Content Strategy
Yes, it’s a strategy to say “We’re going to publish 500 articles about air conditioning filters this year” but that’s a horrible strategy. Who cares about 500 articles on the same topic? Online customer interaction is not the same as offline customer interaction where people come into a store and ask the sales clerks the same questions all day long. Those offline conversations can be repeated ad nauseum and hopefully the sales clerks will improve their interaction skills so they close more happy customers.
But in the online world “more of the same” is pretty much the least optimal content strategy. Your content strategy should be a full conversation. 200+ articles about the same government form is not a full conversaton — that’s just someone chasing keywords in a spreadsheet.
Keywords-in-spreadsheets do NOT optimize for search. If they did then Google’s Panda algorithm would not have been effective.
Your content strategy should begin with your value proposition. You don’t want to come up with 20,000 ways of directly pitching your value proposition to customers — you want to come up with an indeterminate thousands of ways of SHOWING your value proposition to people continuously.
Show, don’t tell is far more important to search engine optimization than counting keywords.
Your Links Should Do Something Useful
Too many companies are chasing guest posts and infographics. No one should be doing this because they are only doing it for the sake of obtaining more links.
Getting links is easy. If the links just sit there, however, and don’t actually do anything then they aren’t really links so much as they are artificial signals for the search engines. And artificial signals for search engines are preliminary to earning search engine penalties and downgrades.
If you’re just getting links because you think that is what SEO does, you have a penalty or downgrade in your future. It’s not a matter of IF but of WHEN.
If the links have no value outside the search environment then the search engines won’t want them to have value in the search algorithms. That’s a pretty simple lesson. It should have been learned ten times over by now, but people still don’t get it. The reset in the wake of Penguin is almost complete. Once again the SEO community is starting to share linking tips and resources like there is no end to the opportunities they represent.
How many times do SEO bloggers have to come up looking like incompetent fools before the people they are trying to serve figure out that you guys ain’t got any more clue than the rest of us?
Analytics Have to Be Used to Measure Change
We are not optimizing for search if nothing changes. Search analytics data has to show you where things change so that you can either do more of what works or less of what hurts. If nothing is changing you’re stuck in neutral and not going anywhere.
It is mathematically impossible to maintain any specific level of search referral traffic for an extended period of time. People change the queries they use and over time all query spaces die. So if you’re not tracking change and growing traffic where you have upward trends then you can pretty much expect your stagnant performance to slowly degrade.
Learning how to use the basic tools is only the first step. You also have to learn WHY you use them and WHAT you’re supposed to achieve with them. Chasing keywords and links is not search engine optimization because it is not search engine marketing.
If you don’t build your market and increase your sales and conversions then you need to try something different. More of the same doesn’t cut the mustard if it’s not growing your online business.
By Michael Martinez
http://www.seo-theory.com/
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