Actually, SEO doesn’t even start with a good keyword ranking.

When our clients ask for help in ranking for a specific keyword, or are closely monitoring where they stand (“did you see? we moved up four spots for our company name!”), we invariably stump them when we ask, “and then what?”. Did you check your Analytics after this ranking change to see if new site visitors increased, or if they spent longer on your site, or if they visited more pages? Did you receive more contact us forms, leads, sales? The complete question is not only where you rank, but what actions resulted from those rankings.

Keyword rankings started out as a good indicator of how successful a business could be online. But as more and more people figured out ways to game the system (keyword stuffing, shady linkbuilding and the like), those running the search engines developed ways to combat this. Semantic search, “not provided, ” personalized search, Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates… These are just a few of the factors that all but guarantee that you can’t measure the success of an SEO program by tracking where you rank for a specific keyword.

These factors also meant that while many businesses were still focused on traditional SEO tactics, those at the forefront moved on to content marketing – the next quick fix for getting found online. How many times have we read that “content is king” for any online marketing program? Search “quality content” and Google returns about 29, 500, 000 web pages, many of which are eager to provide a formula for producing and promoting good content for your website. Again, we ask, what results do your content marketing efforts produce?

SEO Is Not a Silo Tactic

Sales Renewal believes that SEO cannot be “done” in a stand-alone fashion. Yes, we focus on keywords – each web page or blog post we write has a target keyword. Yes, we focus on on-page factors like title tags and meta descriptions (quite often what is visible in the search results). Yes, we focus on technical factors like speed and broken links. Yes, we focus on off-page factors like relevant links coming from diverse sources linking to different pages on your site.

But if you hire us to “do SEO, ” we’re going to ask a whole lot of questions that at first may not seem relevant to keyword rankings. We’ll ask about your target prospects (your customer personas). We’ll work with you to develop descriptions of your target prospects at the three key stages of the sales funnel (what do they look for when searching for solutions to problems? Comparing vendors? Ready to buy?). We’ll develop your Key Concepts – top-level categories that define your business, including your brand, industry, products and services – and map them to your web pages and target prospects. (Do you have content for visitors at each stage of the sales funnel?) We’ll review your website for appropriate calls to action, depth and quality of content. We’ll review your business presence in online directories and listings sites. We’ll encourage you to produce a company blog and build a reasonable presence on appropriate social media sites.

We ask all these questions because we don’t treat SEO as a silo tactic. Instead, we believe it is an integral part of your overall marketing mix. Managed properly, SEO can help your business by driving relevant traffic to your website and, ultimately, generating leads and sales for your business. Contact us about getting your SEO program started, or find out more about SEO the Sales Renewal way here.