Marketing More Powerful Than SEO
By Mark Daoust

There is a vicious rumor circulating among website owners that search engine optimization (SEO) is the single most powerful form of marketing on the web. I have my suspicions that this rumor was started by professional search engine optimizers, but I have not yet received my mail-in Nancy Drew kit to reach a definitive conclusion. All the same, it might be best to not share this information with any professional SEO who is trying to win your business.

Just the title of this article made me cringe. I thought, here’s another traditional marketing rep coming along with a sense of inflated self-importance and he’s going to prove to us all how wrong it is to focus too heavily on SEO. Yeah, right.

But I know for a fact that you can get excellent conversions with a poorly SEOd website, though I recommend trying it this way. Still, this “vicious rumor,” it isn’t really a rumor. I don’t know anyone who believes that SEO is more powerful than, say, PPC. But it is very important. Let anyone deny that.

The essence of SEO boils down to one thing: How crafty you are at getting the search engines to agree that you deserve to appear at the top of the listings for specific search terms. There is an art to it and it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with meta tags. In a word, content is the real SEO. Develop great, original content that uses the proper keywords in all the right ways and you can get that coveted No. 1 spot on Google. But that won’t guarantee any sales.

The truth, however, must be told – SEO is not the best marketing for your website. To those of you who are professional marketers, this will not come as a surprise, but SEO takes a backseat to the real king of marketing. Unfortunately the mystique of Google, complete with their daily updates and rumors (I heard that Larry Page has been parting his hair on the other side this week – a pagerank update must be near!), has gotten so many website owners Googley-eyed that they are missing the real marketing gem that we should all be aiming for.

The truth is that SEO should not be the only marketing for your website, but you can’t argue that your website shouldn’t be SEOd. That would be absurd.

Maybe if you have a video or e-book product that you want to sell and you want to put up a one-page website that sells your product and you want to focus on emotional triggers to get your audience to buy from then SEO may not be important to you. But you likely won’t get any drive by traffic, which means all of your traffic will be driven to your website by your own marketing efforts. If you are confident enough in your abilities to get your buyers there through that means then, by all means, ditch the SEO. Otherwise, SEO is free and valuable.

Buzzing Over Your Website

Marketers know that there is one thing that will bring more sales for a website than a well-optimized site could ever bring: buzz. This has also been called viral marketing or passive marketing, but unfortunately both of those phrases have been used so much that they lack their own buzz-power, and as a result we often look away when someone mentions viral marketing.

There is no real secret to viral marketing – the secret is to do just what the name says: create a buzz. You want people to talk about your website, to let others in on their secret which is your website. You want those that learn about you to have a sense of excitement, a sense of privilege, a sense that only you can offer what they are seeing. You do not want to resort to calculating CPM rates, optimizing PPC campaigns, or working tirelessly on optimizing your website for some algorithm that is likely to change in a month – you want others to market your website for you.

And that is just what viral marketing is – it is the process of getting others to market your website for you.

Viral marketing is really hype. That’s what most of us with any sense call it. That’s why we “look away” when someone says it. We’re essentially thinking, Oh Boy! Here’s another slick-haired snake oil salesman.

The problem with this whole line of reasoning is that SEO is predicated upon some here today, gone tomorrow technique the search engines reward only if you happen to hit the mark at the right time. Nothing could be further from the truth. SEO has been a part of website marketing since the very first website was built. It’s all about making your website sticky enough that people will want to visit it and take the desired action once they get there. If you do your SEO right, you can create the kind of buzz this author is talking about.

There is nothing wrong with viral marketing. You always want people talking about you. In the offline world it’s called “word of mouth.” The buzz is just giving people a reason to talk about you behind your back in a good way. Anyone who says you can’t do that with SEO doesn’t understand SEO.

About The Author
Mark Daoust is the former owner of Site-Reference.com. This article was originally published at www.site-reference.com/articles/Internet-Marketing/Marketing-More-Powerful-Than-SEO.html

Return tomorrow, when I tear viral marketing a new one.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.