SEO: Is it Marketing or Technology?

By: Kapil Gupta
Submitted: 2008-10-08 15:03:31
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The question "Is SEO marketing or technology?" has been debated heatedly for the last decade.  So far the debate has mostly been won by technologists, but overtime as the Online World has evolved to measuring business results, and the search engines have become more sophisticated to delivering results, the scales have started to tilt towards the marketing camp.

What exactly is Search Engine Optimization?
Most online businesses along with SEO companies define SEO as a set of techniques that help ensure that the website is built such that the search engines treat them as relevant targets (destinations) for the appropriate Keywords. These Keywords are the ones a potential customer would type on the search engine to find you or your business. 

This has led to the interpretation that SEO is creation of a structure such that your website is populated very heavily with appropriate Keywords. Based on how your website is populated with these Keywords the search engines will display your company or website in the search results in response to a search query. Hence, SEO is about finding the right Keywords and ensuring those Keywords are heavily populated on your website.

Now, I am in agreement with this definition, but I would submit that this interpretation is incomplete and misses the big picture.

The fundamental question to be addressed is whether the online presence we build is for the search engines to drive appropriate traffic or whether the websites we build are for the potential customer to get the best information when he or she interacts with the company in the Online World.  SEO experts have always grappled with this question, till the answer was provided by none other than the sources themselves, the search engine companies, and they ruled in favor of the customers.

All of the search engines today are sophisticated enough that they don’t look for Keywords on website; they actually measure you on the relevancy of your content and your website to the query initiated by the searcher.  So, SEO is no longer "The technology of Keyword stuffing and links"; SEO has transformed into the marketing and art of making your website relevant to the search, and providing people with maximum pull to convert from visitors to Customers. Relevancy for the customer has become the single most important factor for a search engine to rate any business.

The art of providing this pull to the customers has always been thought of as a feature of the website and has always been delegated to the web-designers and marketers, but the changing preferences of people in the online world and the maturity of the industry is calling for this to change.

I have always been a firm believer that all potential customers require appropriate messaging addressing all their concerns before they engage with a website or a business.  SEO/PPC Services must accomplish this task.

Take a moment and answer this question:
What makes you decide to click on a particular result when you search on Google?

I hope your answer is the content of that link you see on the search results page, which are the 'Title' and the 'Description'. If you didn’t then please conduct a search for something and observe the results you get back.

For a customer using SEO, the first interaction with a company happens when they type the Keyword in the search engine. The initial concerns of the customer needs to be handled right there. So, an SEO specialist must think about Title and Descriptions for a customer’s website not just from a technology (Keyword Density) standpoint, but more importantly from the standpoint of addressing the customer concerns. This philosophy has been used in PPC for quite sometime, but never made it to the SEO world due to requirements for Keyword stuffing.

Given that ‘Title’ and ‘Description’ play a critical role in people clicking on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), you would want to take utmost care in writing the content for these tags. Your SEO results are like Ads for your webpage.

You may not be ranked 1st on Google for a desired keyword, still you can acquire more (and relevant) traffic (reminds you of CTR?) to your website than the site which is 1st. Provided, the content you write in the Title and Description tags is relevant to the searchers. To breakdown ‘relevancy’ further, I would recommend asking yourself the following questions, while you are writing Title and Description tags for your web pages:

1.    Are you communicating effectively with all potential customer segments?
    People in different stages of their buying cycle.
    People with different level of knowledge of your domain, you product or its usability.
    People with different behavior types.

The search optimizer needs to develop enough domain expertise or utilize domain expertise where it’s available to identify all customer concerns, and prioritize the customer concerns to address them at appropriate communication outlets. Communication of value propositions and differentiation has also to be integrated into the thought process effectively.

2.    Are you persuading the searcher to take the desired action? For e.g. if you are looking at getting people try your product for free, do mention the same, especially in the way that ‘you are calling them for action’.

3.    Is your copy optimized for SEO? While ensuring the above points, do not forget to optimize your tags for SEO – in other words, do include the keywords in your tags. Otherwise you will not even get the chance to benefit from the above ?.

Look at the following search results (in the actual order they appear) when a PMP (Project Management Professional) certification aspirant searches for ‘pmp certification‘ on Google.

Don’t you think that the 3rd result is likely to drive more clicks than the 1st and the 2nd result.

The 3rd title/description addresses all initial customer concerns, namely: What does the company offer (SCJP Exam prep to pass SCJP Certification Exam), what have they done so far (Since 2000, 1M+ users, 50K customer), what did other people get from them (99.7% success), will they be valuable for me (Comprehensive report); can I try (free mock test); are they a very small company (ISO9001 certification); can I trust them (100% guarantee).

At the same time, this Title and Description has good usage of Keywords as well. SCJP, Certification, Exam, Prep, Mock, Test, users are all very important Keywords for this customer.

Since Google will only display around first 60 characters of the Title Tag and first 155 characters of the Description Meta tag, companies should ensure that they are addressing the above questions within the given limits. And, most of the times, it will require you to be creative. So, when you are looking for hiring an SEO professional, don’t forget to add ‘creativity’ as one of the key skills.

Now, let me make a giant leap and refer to your online presence as your sales person on the web. With that, your online presence should provide everything that your sales person provides your customer. Take some time and evaluate your online presence as if you were evaluating your sales person, and see how good of a sales person it is or another way to question would to evaluate your marketing efforts in equipping and training your salesperson.

From Titles and Descriptions, to the website content, navigation and usability, to content of PR’s and Articles and Social Bookmarking, consider all your SEO efforts as part of your marketing efforts equipping, training, and building an effective sales person. Addressing customer concerns at every stage of the buying cycle is something that comes naturally to the exceptional sales person, and it needs to be replicated in your online presence.

If your online presence is designed to answer the questions your website visitors ask, you can not only expect higher Search Engine rankings but also better conversions, which is even more important than getting more traffic. The same applies to the keyword research. Ultimately, relevancy is the key and that is what a Search Engine now rates higher than any other parameter.

Given that Search Engines are always striving to produce high quality SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), the parameter that determines their success, a Search Engine Optimizer always stand to win in a long run by betting on usability.

In this article we explored how writing effective Titles and Descriptions can help your business and conversions grow. In the next article, we will explore other areas where a conversion-oriented philosophy will take even closer to your goals. Its not about traffic, it is all about relevant traffic and conversions. Read more learning’s on online marketing article page.

Article source: Expert Articles