3 keys to great SEO – Strategic Executive Opportunity

SEO – search engine optimization – continues to be a central tenet of website strategies. However, it tends to be a moving feast and opinions on how best to do SEO vary as much as the weather. As long as search continues to be a dominant route to discovery, SEO will remain important. Agencies keep on proposing new techniques, often in response to moves from within the black box of the Google algorithm. How to keep a steady path when it seems that Google is trying to pull the carpet out under “gaming” its search results?

The groundwork — that underpins the best of long-term business practices — should remain the same: develop relationships, create trust and provide value. {Tweet this} As such, considering SEO is about establishing KEY words, I find that it can be a very valid way to revisit who one’s identity and competitive advantage.

SEO is strategic

SEO is often maligned for being a way to “game” search engines. However, when viewed with a certain distance — especially from near-term profit pressures, I believe that SEO is absolutely strategic. The way I was taught SEO by my SEO guru, Jeremy Boyé, was to create a list of ten keyword sets and ten key sentences that would become the backbone of my blog strategy. Crafting those ten sentences was a labor of love. And like any proper strategy, they need to evolve with the changing times. The notion behind these ten key phrases was to find a unique combination:

1. consistent with who you are and what you offer
2. corresponds to what people are looking for
3. is different from what other people provide

SEO = Strategic Executive Opportunity

Crafted in such terms, the top ten keywords for which you want to be found make SEO an absolutely critical component of a marketing strategy. Choices must be made. Editorial lines must be chosen. Relevant and valuable content must be created. And, for some brands, it would make sense that certain keywords must be purchased (i.e. SEM). In reality, many brands are far too broad or vague in their definition. This is inevitably reflected in the plethoric number of keywords that feature on their Google invoice. However, poignantly, it is also reflects how undefined brands become when short-term profits dominate the mindset, as opposed to long-term value creation, storytelling and loyalty building. {Tweet this!} The process of determining the short list becomes a strategic executive opportunity to define and refine one’s brand, much less one’s presence online.

How many brands — with their agencies of record — are actively culling their list of keywords down to the core, aligned with the best strategic executive opportunities?