Creating a Winning SEO Strategy

If you produce a product or service that you want to promote online, then you have to create content. From an SEO perspective you need to have very tight control over the release of this content so that it adds value to your online presence and becomes a key aspect of building your brand and driving sales online.

SEO is largely ’first come, first served’. Google Base, essential for promoting products with pricing online, actively filters out duplicate content and bars sites which consistently have duplicate (spam as far as Google is concerned) content. More importantly, being consistently the first with content ’Scoops’ means that you will build up an online following, with plenty of incoming links and consistent traffic growth.

The Winning Mentality

It is essential to build up a Publishing mentality and that everyone in the organisation who is involved on the sales and marketing side is following the same schedule. You need to generate regular content and you need to promote your Scoops with maximum effect. Your content should be jealously guarded and used to make the maximum impact. 

When it comes to online publishing, content is king and timing is everything. If you have exclusive content you have to ’use it or lose it’. Most of the web is derivative, nine out of ten stories you see are derived from other sources up the line. Being the first means that you are quoted and referred to, and more importantly you get in at the head of the pack in the Google index. Which means that when everyone else is searching on the subject they see your page and it builds up a virtuous cycle.

You should always look to release exclusive content, both information and media through your site whenever you are launching a new product or service. You should develop two sets of promotional content: the first content set is intended purely for your own promotional purposes. This content should first be placed on your site first (with watermarks where necessary), and only when it has been indexed by the key search engines, should it be promoted through the leading social media channels.

These media spaces are tightly controlled, and wherever possible automation should be used to maximize productivity and ensure reliable distribution. This means you should use platforms which automatically synchronise with your social media spaces, real-time where required and on a time-delay cycle where necessary. To maximize your long-term search engine position you should stage-release ’extra’ content to ensure that your page is fresh and has content which people will come back to.

The second content set is the public distributed materials. These need to include information pages with a titles, teasers (synopsis), detailed descriptions and technical information. Additional collateral should include images and if possible videos.

It is essential that this content set is made as readily available as possible. To minimise copying of your core promotional content, this second set should be distributed directly wherever possible to the press, bloggers and resellers. The easier you make it for people to use it, the less your core content set will be copy / pasted.

Your specific strategy on timing the content release will vary. If you have direct sales channels which you want to promote, then releasing the information to the press and bloggers before you release it to your resellers forces the news sites / blogs to refer back to you and your site(s) as a source. If you are purely using distributors / resellers then you will want to provide the information to them prior to the public release and then do your promotions in a coordinated manner.

If you are a distributor for multiple product lines, everything becomes amplified. You should run the content and online parts of your business in the same way as leading online publications do. 

Be Prepared for Grunt Work

There are many ways in which you can make your job easier when driving a successful SEO campaign (a lot of them are outlined here), but ultimately there is still a lot of work to be done: content doesn’t just create itself, and your brand doesn’t just go viral. Ultimately there’s a lot of planning, preparation, analysis and hard graft that goes into successful SEO campaigns. Once you’ve got the right channels and relationships in place your life gets a lot easier.

The Domain Factor

Every page on your site which builds up a decent page rank helps the overall site rank, and over the long-term drives up the rank on the site homepage, this is known as the Domain Effect. It is key to boosting the value of your brands online.

Running your online operation across multiple platforms and domains greatly reduces its SEO effectiveness. If you have all the key online business elements, e.g. a website, ecommerce site, blog, social space, and media space all on separate domains and they’re averaging a 2 or 3 Google Page Rank (PR), then these don’t add up to a PR of 15, they aggregate out at a maximum PR of 3.

If you have the same sites running off the same domain with seamless connections then you will easily achieve a PR of 5 or 6 and build from there. The Google Page Rank is a logarithmic scale, it means that you can easily build up the low numbers, but getting above a page rank of 6 or 7 is far more difficult.

High Page Ranks drive organic traffic to your site. Once established, highly ranked pages make promoting your messages online a great deal easier, and faster.

Blog Blog Blog

Nothing is more effective at engaging with audiences online than a great blog. It also happens to be the best and easiest way to generate great targeted content that the search engines love. You should relate this content in throughout your site to provide fresh, on-topic links and content to all your key pages.

Make sure your blog is the ’Go To Place’ for everything about your brands. Make it the centre point for all your promotions and social media.

Tagging, Taxonomies and Topic (landing) Pages

There are few things more important with SEO than identifying the key terms for driving your business online. These terms fall into a couple of categories: the ones you use to communicate about your products and services internally, which may also be industry terms; and terms which users use to find out about your products and services. Usually there is a big overlap in these terms, but not always.

Start by building your ’Taxonomy’, which is essentially a hierarchy of keywords, based on your internal keyword structure which could be brands, product lines, content categories, customer profiles etc. Each one of these can have their own tag tree. Next, identify the keywords that are used by people trying to find your products. An easy way to get started is by looking at the analytics and seeing how people found your website. There are lots of SEO tools that can help you with this, but for the fastest (and often the best) results get in an SEO agency / consultant to help you with this.

Where you have limited resources use incoming, on-topic feeds to help populate your landing pages. Great sites for feeds are Twitter, YouTube (videos) and Google News. You can also do deals with 3rd parties for exclusive content. If you are paying for content make sure that you either have exclusivity or an exclusivity period for using the content.

You need to make sure that you create relevant content and landing pages for the key tags, automate as much of this as possible.

’Own’ your Social Media Spaces

It is important that you take ownership of your social media spaces. These are the pages on the leading spaces such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which users will go to if they are looking to engage with your brand. They frequently rank right at the top of Google and other search engines. If competitors, staff, 3rd parties, resellers, distributors, fans or any other party is running a page which is core to your brand, then you need to be focused on getting them back under your control.

For resellers in specific markets it’s great that they’re promoting your brand, but make sure that they append the target market to the name, e.g. Brand UK or Brand Asia. These spaces can be key to your brand and revenue building and should be integral to your customer / prospect engagement strategies.

The term ’Own’ is somewhat an ironic reference since you must at all times be aware that very few of the social platforms actually let you own the space on their platforms. They are able to change service levels at any time and are able to remove services or charge for the use of their spaces. They’re also able to (and actively do) transfer or shut down spaces with no notice. It means you need to be very aware of the fact that there are no guarantees that these sites will always be there to drive your social engagement. Probability though says that most likely they will, and if not, then others will come to replace them.

You should also make sure that you take ownership of the social spaces for your target markets, e.g. twitter.com/widgets if you are a leading producer or distributor of widgets. These provide natural SEO for you and are will fit naturally into people’s search patterns.

Automate Promotion

At any time, there will be hundreds of different things you could be doing to improve the awareness of your brand, products and services online. It means that wherever possible you should automate the routine. At the most basic level this means having all your content assets readily available, so that any manual task you have to do is done as efficiently as possible.

The great thing about the web is that through traditional means such as RSS / Atom feeds and Podcasting you can distribute your content easily. Many sites let you set up incoming feeds to share your content, or to log it in search engines. Making these feeds public means that the online media can also track your latest updates with ease and incorporate the content automatically within their sites and services. Set up Social Bookmarker, e.g. for Digg and Facebook so that people can easily promote the site. Have automated newsletters and content alerts, which notify anyone who signs up of your latest content.

Use solutions which centrally manage and distribute your content to the leading social, media and commercial sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google Base, eBay and YouTube. Most of the major portals have APIs, these allow 3rd party solutions (and sites) to directly publish content to them. Better yet, use a solution which allows you to publish the content centrally and distribute it automatically (see Leverage Affino below).

Build Personal Relationships with Editors of the Leading Online Publications

With all the tech and potential for automation in place, people often forget that there are people driving every significant website. It is just as important to build direct relationships with the top bloggers, editors and enthusiasts as it has ever been. Make certain that you identify the leading news / opinion sites for your brands and products and build up close relationships with the key people running them.

Provide them with scoops, previews, and review samples. Run joint promotions and competitions. Many of these sites are marginal businesses and small incentives can go a long way.

Use the Best SEO and Analytics Tools

There are a lot of great free, incredibly useful tools out there to help companies get going. The essential starting point is to register your sitemaps with the leading search engines (Google Webmaster Tools, Bing / Yahoo and Ask). Next you should get analytics up and running, e.g. Google Analytics. Don’t be shy about using two or three tools since there is no perfect solution and all have their strengths.

Use SEO analysis tools and join professional SEO sites such as SEOmoz, try out all the leading SEO plugins on Firefox and see which best suit you. Use these tools to identify problems with your pages and sites to ensure you have the right mix. Use them to identify your page ranks and monitor these regularly by running weekly reports.

Help Others Do It for You

This is a general principle that will make you much more productive. Help others to promote you as effectively as possible. Motivate them in the various ways outlined, and any other way which works. Build up good relationships with opinion leaders and you can ramp up your effectiveness very quickly.

Integrate Promotions with your Sales Channels

To get the most out of your promotions make sure that they are 100% integrated with you sales channels. If you have a landing page for a product, make sure users can buy the product right off the page (i.e. add to basket). Use this principle throughout your promotional activities.

Continually Check the User Experience

You must continuously check the user experience. Do this as part of the core routine, but also get others in the company, customers, friends and 3rd parties to provide feedback regularly. You should be continuously improving the user experience, tweaking and fine tuning.

Leverage Affino

SEO is at the heart of what Affino does. Every strategy outlined above can be executed by using Affino to drive your business online.