Natural, (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search as opposed to paid search. (Separate post to follow on paid search.)

Why do I need it?

The value proposition for SEO seems pretty clear. SEO increases organic search traffic volume. And if done properly also increases the traffic quality.

One client, NAPCO Publications, saw a 10% – 40% increase in all their key performance indicators (KPI’s) across all 20 of their online publications, just six months after the on-site SEO best practices training.

Traffic quality is important. Increasing traffic for the sake of nice looking analytics reports alone is a waste of time. And if you can not fulfill the person’s need, you create a frustrating user experience and it is an affront to your brand. The people that come to your site should be looking for the services and solutions you provide.

Much of what we do with our clients starts with identifying pain points. First, your site has to be visible on the search engines to get traffic from the search engines. This sounds simple enough but there are lots of sites out there with technologies that search engines don’t like and will not index.

Search engines don’t like iframes, AJAX, Java or JavaScript, and especially sites all in flash. They don’t’ like long urls or urls that look like a bunch of gobblety gook. They don’t register, take cookies or fill out forms of any kind. SO if you have these things in place as a hurdle to accessing to your Web site’s content you are in trouble.

To see if your site is indexed at all and what is there you can do a simple search on Google. Enter Site:www.your-web-site.com into a Google search. Insert your company’s url into www.your-web-site.com. If you have 100’s or 1000’s of Web pages and only a few show up you have a problem. If all the pages that appear look the same in the search results, you also have a problem.

If a search engine can’t see your site, they can’t present it in search results. If all your pages use the same title, and meta description the search engine doesn’t know how to score that page. All your pages are then competing for the same thing. It has to pick one that is authoritative so that usually means only the home page wins. This is bad, mmmkay. And even worse is every page has names like “home,” “about us”, “contacts” and “services.” Not descriptive enough to say what you do and competing with every other page in the Web for the words, “home”, “about us”, “contacts” and “services.” This is really bad, mmmkay.

Search engines, for the most part, are literal. They don’t get puns, jokes or clever turns of phrase. Search engines are moving toward being more semantic but are definitely not all there yet. For the most part, if you don’t have the exact keywords someone is searching for in your pages, you will not get found for those searches.

Natural search is pull marketing. It’s a matter of catching searchers when they have a need you can fulfill by using the content of your site as bait in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher your rank and relevancy the more clicks you will receive. Simple? Maybe…

Do you know where your prospects are doing research and ultimately making a buying decision? Knowing where someone is in the conversion cycle is essential to understanding how to approach them with your content.

Below is an example of one possible scenario of a company searching for ways to “go green.” Using the conversion cycle we can identify the words people find information with to drive Web site content development that supports subsequent pre-qualified traffic.

“Where” are they in the conversion cycle? What words do they use?:

Conversion Cycle……………Search Terms
Learn………………………………….Going Green
Shop…………………………………..Most Efficient Solar Hot Water Panels
Buy…………………………………….Surface Power Solar Water Heater
Get…………………………………….Surface Power Order Tracking
Use…………………………………….Surface Power SP501 Support

The conversion cycle’s searches can further be categorized by “type” of search.

Search Type………………….Search Phrase
Navigational……………………….….Surface Power Official Website
Navigational……………………….….Surface Power Order Tracking
Navigational……………………….….Surface Power SP501 Support

Informational……………………..…..Going Green
Informational…………………….……Most Efficient Solar Hot Water Panels

Transactional………………………….Surface Power Solar Water Heater

Getting someone in the buy / transactional state is optimal but there are opportunities to catch prospects outside that sweet spot. Learning about solar panels or going green and why your products are the best solution amongst many, brings them in much earlier. By educating, we drive sales.

After the sale, in the use stage, service issues can arise and drive opportunities. Covering common problems with competing products/services, and providing solutions along with reasons your product/service solves the problem creates traffic opportunities. They need you most when they have a problem to be solved. Why not build content for that?

It’s not magic; but to get search traffic you have to have content on what people are searching for. To be found for these needs you must integrate the exact words and phrases people search for into your Web pages.

Most clients Astek helps are initially optimizing existing content to help these pages perform better. As that process is moving forward, often valuable keyword opportunities are discovered where their site has no coverage but there is active search traffic and preferably with very few competing pages. These discoveries often drive the editorial process.

After going through the process most companies also see their business in a whole new light. Understating how and what people search for is a window into their needs and a way you can better serve prospects and customers.

To make it work you need a champion for the cause. And if you are doing this in-house, you will need specific assignments, assignees, and a disciplined workflow including a final QA step.

It all comes down to using the “right keywords” in your Web pages. There are lots of tools to help with the selection process, but it still takes a brain to make the right selection.

There are both paid and free keyword research tools. Tools like WordTracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com and Google’s Keyword Tool are effective in revealing words people actually search for. (My associate Andrew Crowe gives a great overview of one of these tools in this article.)

In the B2B space, many searches have low volumes, under 100 a day. But a sale can mean 100’s of millions in new revenue to some. Don’t be discouraged by what appears to be low search counts if that search term is exactly what you do. Prioritize your efforts for the greatest ROI.

When used properly, keyword selection tools help you see what your prospects and customers are thinking and by developing or optimizing existing content for these words and phrases, you will generate more traffic and conversions assuming you have a search engine friendly Website of course.

If you tried SEO in the past and the tactics seemed too technical or too time consuming – it may have been the result or lack of a search engine friendly content management system (CMS). It’s a process that doesn’t need to be difficult if the right tools are in place to support your efforts.

These days, after you have selected your targeted keywords, a search engine friendly CMS automates much of the repetitive tasks. There are several off the shelf blogging tools like WordPress and TypePad that do the job nicely for simple publishing. However, Astek’s new CMS, Webany provides a much more robust yet surprisingly affordable search engine friendly option to Web site hosting and publishing. (Blatant commercial over.)

The nice thing about SEO is that the results of your efforts are extremely measurable.

What are you business goals, sales, community relations, customer support, thought leadership? Optimizing your pages ensures discovery for the reasons people search, and builds incremental opportunities for conversions.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to optimize your Website for search engines, please contact Astek!