21 Aug 08 Are you an online cake eater?

There seems to be a common trend in marketing (and probably throughout a lot of business sectors) that people seem to be adamant that they can have their cake and eat it. That is, having two things that are mutually incompatible.

 

Here are a few examples I have come across -

 

1. Paying for an advertising medium with a specific pricing metric/ model and then measuring its performance against another. For example - paying for ad space on Google on a CPM basis then measuring its performance on a CPC basis, or a CPA basis. While it is acceptable to work out how valuable it was across a variety of metrics makes sense, assessing performance on anything but the bar you were paying them to jump over isn’t.

 

2. Paying for an advertising medium with accountability, transparency and measurability and rather than expecting to pay more for the accountability - expecting to pay less because it is easier to accurately attribute value to the medium and disregarding the lack of transparency in other mediums.

 

3. Buying marketing communication and expecting that you are buying sales - ie the difference between paying for ad space and paying for a salesman.

 

4.  Using the term SEO to mean “Free SEM“and expecting that manipulating your organic ranking in Google is as easy as managing a SEM campaign, only that it refers better traffic, and it is free.

 

All of these are examples of people looking at the world and ignoring the realities of the balancing forces that make the market work. The main point I want to focus on here is point 4, because I have heard a few people talk about running SEO campaigns. The problem with this mentality is that you simply can’t run an SEO “campaign”, at least not effectively. You need to have an SEO “strategy”. Having an SEO campaign is like saying “I need to have a logistics campaign for Christmas” when what you really need is an ongoing logistics strategy that is continually refined making supply chain management all the more efficient.

 

SEO is essentially split into 2 parts, on site and off  site. On site is just building the right architecture and signage for your website so that all of your information can be easily accessed by humans and crawlers. The easier this signage is to understand, the better you will rank for it over time. Off site is another ball game, and for simplicity, I’ll just say largely out of your control - just add value and people will link to you. Being listed in authoritative directories in your field is probably the best off site thing you can do. Following that, participate in relevant social communities.

 

SEM however, is your almost guaranteed (paid) fast track to search front page bliss, and if you have decent landing pages, then the amount of these that you have is the only limit for your search term breadth. For SEO, you really have to target much more niche keywords as you don’t have the opportunity to take hold of the dominant traffic driving keywords, unless you have a really clever strategy or you are prepared to put in a lot of hard work.

Changing process of things you already do is usually the best approach to SEO - that is why they call it an “Optimisation”, rather than a “Campaign”.

One example of this (or even try here) is that I have noticed that the offers that stay on Lasoo for longer periods of time, seem to get better traction in Google organic results - despite Google’s hunger for dynamic content, the historical information it can build for longer term URL’s add to Google’s understanding of a page’s relevance. It also allows social communities, and other websites to build links into the page, thus increasing the page rank.

This shouldn’t be the main driver in how you sell things (Product pages achieve a similar kind of result) however, people love offers, and they love linking to them, so having some long term deals might be a good move on specific loss leading items. So if you are an online cake eater, this is just some food for thought….mmmm…. thought.