Tips For Marketing Professionals – Don’t Get Blinded by SEO Science

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a science. Having overseen and outsourced SEO functions for blue chip clients in Finance, IT, Retail, Pharma and Construction here are a number of simple considerations for marketing professionals overseeing SEO strategy. Keyword selection is your vital first port of call. When meeting an SEO professional for the first time remember you know your business better than anyone else. Your SEO professional might display a sound understanding of SEO principles regarding traffic generation, popular key words and phrases, overture research, keyword selection tools, keyword density and keyword position but how does this relate to your revenue streams – that’s your call. For example I recently inherited an SEO strategy for a specialist construction recruitment consultancy. Looking through the keywords that had been implemented by the SEO team to date I quickly realised a fatal floor. The simple search term ‘construction’ may generate the most traffic for the company but why optimize for such a loose term when a visitor searching ‘construction+jobs’ clearly represents a more direct lead for your organization. You know your business model, market place and target audience so trust your business insight – don’t get blinded by SEO ‘science’. Exactly what am I paying for? I like to ask myself this question from time to time. The answer should be a greater search engine presence and lead generation. There are a few simple tools you can use to address this – completing your own searches, using the Google link search feature, checking your ‘Google Page Rank’ etc but you’re paying a specialist to manage expectations so make sure your expectations are being met. For me reporting at least once every two weeks is the main provision I want to see on any agreement. This gives you the opportunity to compare actual results with what you were pitched at the start of the campaign but also to analyse your SEO strategy against your competitors. You could also install a dedicated link for your SEO team to use to track actual results. Be sure to analyse the reports, run a few spot checks on the results. Remember you want to see your website moving up the search engine results pages. Why should you be paying for little or no progress especially at the start of your SEO strategy where scope for improvement is huge? If you want to know more about SEO, read through the following articles:, SEO Elements , SEO Business Tactic , Search Engine Optimization – Pros And Cons.