When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it's important to think outside–way outside–the search engine page.
I'll make sure your new website code is
search-engine-optimized
, but you need to know that
SEO
is only
one step in a
seven
step process by which you obtain a customer through (or without!) search engines. And
each
of those seven steps, not just one, needs optimization, or all the SEO in the world can become useless. So your
website needs more than SEO: it needs
Customer Decision Optimization. Here
are the seven customer-decision web and business responses that must be optimized:
Your customer's decision
step
"What business do I know that provides this product or service?"
"I'll search online. Ten first page listings give me plenty of options."
"Which listings can I trust? Do I recognize the business name?"
"Which listing seems to fit my need best? What do they say?"
"Click it! Now, do they offer what I need? Do I like what I see?"
"I'm ready to do business with this company. Is it easier than others?"
"Quality, value, helpfulness and easy purchase. Recommended!"
Preparing the right
response
1. Promote your website aggressively outside the search engines
2. Perform full SEO of your code, add a mobile site, and get inbound links
3. Get your brand into your page title and early in your search description
4. Craft the rest of your page title and search description with utmost care
5. Have an immediately-attractive, useful, visitor-centered website
6. Make doing business with you completely easy and trouble-free
7. They're happy. Now treat your customer like royalty with web support.
How this approach helps
increase customer contacts
Bypass the search bottleneck! Lead customers to your website outside the search engines by
putting it on every vehicle, invoice, radio ad, window, mug, and salesperson's forehead (kidding).
Clearly a page 1 search listing will help customers see you. Only shysters will guarantee you page 1 placement.
But SEO and a mobile website version will remove factors that rank you lower.
Make your brand visible in search listings! Then your real-world marketing, building public trust
in your brand, can help make you the comfortable search-listing choice over risky unknowns.
You have perhaps fifteen words to convince the person searching to click on your search listing.
Every word of your title and description is worth its weight in gold. Make it count.
You got the click: you've won this search click competition and received a site visitor. Now
success depends on your website quality. I'll have you covered here and throughout these steps.
Your visitor will feel free to try your competitors' listings if things get even a little
difficult. Your site should make it utterly easy to get information, to order or to do any kind of business with you.
Now you know how much work it took to get this customer! Great web-based support and service
after the sale will help keep your new customer, and perhaps even earn you a recommendation.
SEO is a moving target, and websites must be kept abreast of the latest
whims
policies of the search engine companies. If it weren't forced on us, most businesses would say "no thank you" to all the pushups
required to rank well on search engines. In fact many say exactly that, and still build very successful businesses, contrary to some
"conventional wisdom" that's perhaps heavy on convention and light on wisdom.
Customer
Decision Optimization can help you regain control of your market visibility.
Remember, never delegate your company's
success to any other organization. Counting on search engine companies for your business success is like letting your delivery service
decide your product line. Even if they're the biggest delivery service on the planet, they're still just a delivery service. If they
get too big for their britches, you'll find a way around them, and you'll do fine.
