Why SEO Doesn’t Work - Part 4 of 5 Part Series

by Laura Thieme

Have you read my first three parts of this five-part series? If not, click here for links.

I referenced common lines that we have all heard managing SEO campaigns, about why it doesn’t or won’t work. I referenced Dyson vacuum cleaners because of his TV commercial airing, and his story posted on his website. I talked about hard work, hours of hard work to make something better.

I also referenced SEO Best Practices in Part 3, and SEO Worst Practices in Part 1. Dyson’s website ironically does not adhere to SEO best practices, yet he ranks top five in Google for “vacuum cleaner”. Doesn’t that just drive you a little nutty? It’s a perfect example of a site that fails to mention “vacuum cleaner” on its home page and yet ranks for such keyword top five in Google.

There will always be the type of websites that fail to adhere to SEO Best Practices, and yet drive you nuts that they are top-five ranked. And if you read Part 1, and you’re still obsessed with your competitor for a single keyword, you’re guilty of driving us SEOs nuts on a regular basis.

So what are the three main ingredients of a successful SEO campaign, barring the anomalies of sites like Dyson?

1) Strategy
2) Endorsement
3) Implementation

Our successful SEO campaigns have had all three ingredients, without fail. We delivered a smart strategy, which had many ingredients itself; and was continuously revised at crucial stages throughout the life of the account.

But most importantly it was endorsed by executive leadership (C-levels, owners themselves, and/or the Marketing VP level exec). Some of our best endorsers have been the CFOs themselves. Executives continued to endorse - when they had questions - they called us in for a meeting, or on the phone - and we were always in front of them on an annual basis, if not twice a year (out-of-state clients). In-state clients were easier to be in front of monthly or bi-monthly. Relationship management with executive level clients was always, always KEY to the success of a search marketing campaign. Why? Well, executives share things with you that the rest of the staff is not privy too - often sales data. It makes you look differently at your campaign, and see where the sales are coming from. Once you have that data - you can revise your strategy - again, as long as you continue to receive executive face-to-face time and information from them.

Implementation - with SEO - if you don’t implement our recommendations, or give us access to make them ourselves, or enable a tool to transition our recs in an efficient manner - as I said in Part 1, don’t expect SEO to do really well. SEO is much harder to succeed with than paid search SEM campaigns - with those sites you can create your own landing pages, and not affect the rest of the website at all. With SEO - You have to pay your dues, work really hard, and not get expect lot of glamour in the process.

Even if implementation is slow, or done half-way (because of politics or something else), it’s the analytics in the implementation process that can in fact, prove value regardless of how much implementation occurred. Not all things SEO requested will be implemented. Well, if it does, it’s because you had 100% executive endorsement and implementation by the technology team.

But regardless, to prove ongoing value, you’ve got to do the analytics - and have the right tools - a desire to delve into the details and yes, like Dyson, hours of research time, passion to deliver, and ultimately executive endorsement of the details. I’ll share more on the analytics part in Part 5 of this series.
Laura