For many companies, it’s a constant battle to stay at the top of search results. Search engine optimization is always changing, whether Google calls the latest edition a penguin, a panda, or a pterodactyl. Even if you don’t think search results are the main business driver for your company, good SEO is important for building credibility and authority.
SEO is also an important part of positioning your company as an industry leader, so it’s vital to keep abreast of the latest news from leaders in SEO techniques. Here is some recent advice I’ve gotten from SEO experts that will help you think strategically about growing your Web presence.
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz: Combine SEO with other marketing tactics
For many years, SEO was, very nearly, a strategic marketing practice in its own right. That’s becoming less and less true for a number of reasons. Search engines are no longer the only source of organic traffic on the Web. Social networks, blogs, email, RSS subscriptions, and word-of-mouth all compete to drive substantial visits. Also, while search is very often one of the paths people use to discover and research a purchase or engagement, it’s almost never the only one.
Success in SEO today necessitates appealing to the emerging signals search engines are using — content analysis, brand metrics, user and usage data, social networks, new forms of markup, etc. SEO is a powerful tactic, but one that needs to fit into a broader set of inbound marketing channels. The combination of these channels into an inbound strategy can be very powerful, as visitors from these sources tend to be high-loyalty and have a lower cost-to-acquire.
Stephan Aarstol of Tower Paddle Boards: Use SEO to your advantage
Don’t see SEO through tunnel vision. If you’re at the top of the search results, you’re also assumed to be an industry leader. In addition to freely generating direct sales, you earn media attention, attract business development deals, and very effectively build positive brand awareness. ABC’s “Shark Tank” chose Tower Paddle Boards out of over 100 more established paddle boarding brands, and Mark Cuban invested based on my SEO expertise. How’s that for ROI?
Phil Laboon of Eyeflow: Don’t fall for easy “tricks” to improve SEO
Many people are saying that Google’s new Panda and Penguin updates are making SEO more complicated, but in reality, they are just eliminating all the “tricks” and making SEO easier. At its core, SEO is the same as it’s ever been — high-quality natural links and high-quality original content. The issue many people have is they don’t know how to generate links outside of bulk, low-quality web directories or e-zine sites, so they freak out.
My suggestion to all my clients is to create high-quality content (infographics, white papers, eBooks, how-to guides, and educational videos) and push it out through as many channels as possible. If you do this, the links will come, and so will the organic rankings and traffic. If you want to see all the factors that search engines use to “grade” your site, there are many tools that can give you a snapshot of your SEO vitals. I created a site called SEOzio so people could see those factors without logging in or downloading software.
Stephen Woessner of Predictive ROI: Focus on conversions
What most business leaders don’t realize is that you can not only measure SEO’s return on investment, but you can — and should — predict it before you implement any optimization strategies. In the end, rankings don’t matter. Traffic doesn’t matter. Only conversions matter, because they can be measured in dollars and cents. You should absolutely, unequivocally insist that either your in-house team or your vendors provide ROI predictions based on conversions, and they should be held accountable for those results with a guarantee. Why should you be the only one with “skin in the game?”
Michael Marshall of Search Engine Academy: Study your competition
Competitive intelligence has great value for business leaders in many areas. It can help counter competitive threats, seize otherwise unseen opportunities, benchmark leaders in your competitive landscape, and identify your strengths and weaknesses and those of your competitors. Competitive intelligence in SEO is no exception, and you need to learn all you can about the Internet marketing strategy of your competitors for all these same reasons.
In SEO, you not only need to know what competitors are doing, but also know how the industry is changing. Since the world of Internet marketing is constantly growing, it is of vital importance to stay ahead of the competition by keeping up on the industry’s latest strategies and best practices, through reading articles or at conferences like Pubcon and Digital Summit.
Search results have historically been full of “black hat” (read: shady) practices for years, but Google and other search engines are catching on and fighting those techniques. SEO is an increasingly valuable tool to build your business if you do it the right way, and it’s important to take advantage of all that it has to offer. If you naturally position yourself as an industry leader and follow these useful expert tips, the search engines will reward you.
John Hall is the CEO of Influence & Co., a company that assists individuals and brands in growing their influence through thought leadership and content marketing programs. Influence & Co., one of the leading providers of high quality expert content to the world’s top publications, is the creator of Contributor Weekly. Connect with John on Twitter or Google+.
