in SEO Marketing by Jeffrey_Smith

Search Engine Promotion & SEOSearch engine promotion is all about balance and contrary to popular belief, type-in traffic resulting from consumers searching directly for your products and services using keywords only represents a small percentage of overall prospects for your website.
SEO and Search Engine Promotion, by SEO Design Solutions.
To promote anything with verve, the necessity look for holes in the game of the competition and finding new ways to capture the attention of the target audience is paramount to overcoming inherent resistance and predispositions to purchasing.

Just like in the stock market where you buy low sell high, look for opportunities for website promotion. Using the analogy of low hanging fruit, you can saturate keywords with moderate competition and high search volume to yield relevant traffic to your pages.

Through targeting multiple pivotal key phrases (competitive phrases, money phrases, and long-tail phrases) your dependency on each keyword become less important. The low hanging fruit of today could be high search volume terms of tomorrow, so don’t overlook the long tail of search as a viable positioning strategy.

The first step of the campaign – due diligence and competitive analysis.

Did Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe in 1492 without food, supplies or resources? No, but what they did do is discover something else aside from their original intent and course that was so much more rewarding (America).

Much in the same way taking off the promotional blinders when it comes to how you view keywords and the people that use them can dramatically impact what happens when people arrive at your online property.

The next step – seeing beyond the keywords to embrace the market whole.

If your focus is too narrow you can miss the relevance mark from the traffic that is most conducive to your offer. If your focus and keywords are too broad, like trying to rank for the word “internet”, then it is merely an exercise in futility.

The key is to think holistically about your industry and engulf the archetypes that embrace the genre you are targeting. If I know for example that my target audience is between 21-29 years old, would I be talking to them about financial annuity plans?

Highly doubtful, on the contrary I may feature a top 20 countdown with the hottest RSS Feeds, music videos, news and snapshots from the weeks headlines and use Google Trends for analysis to craft my content to promote.

There is no simpler method of just standing in front of existing traffic, instead of thinking in a linear fashion, think contextually. For example, would you be more prone to click an advertisement and visit a site after being relaxed from perusing a related topic or would you just ignore the same ad if you were not interested. Interest and context are the key to catching the prospect at the right time, this can be done through creating or utilizing a synergistic medium to heighten response rates.

The next step – leveraging multiple streams of traffic.

The subjective psychology of click triggers and using the context of the circumstances, the online environment, the mood and the feel of the site (is the sales pitch pushy, flimsy or not clear enough, are the value propositions worth engaging?) all of these facets impact the outcome for conversion.

The point being, instead of trying to wield the web and only hunt down people chicken pecking your keywords in a search engine vs. just seeing that as one aspect of search engine promotion will save you hours of looking at your stats and trying to figure out “where are the hits?”.

If you are targeting a competitive arena (which most people are since they are the most lucrative) think about ways to supplement your strategies through creating an underlying infrastructure that serve as streams to your site as a logical conclusion.

Create widgets and submit them to sites with authority and massive page rank to link back to you. Write a few pieces for social media and have a few test offers or ads on the sidebar to see who clicks through.

The idea here is not all traffic is good traffic but all relevant traffic is great traffic to your pages. Even though they may have drifted in on a wafting impulse from a sparsely related topic, with a carefully crafted offer, a touch or branding and a call to action, such leads could be priceless in the end.

The purpose of SEO is to strategically drive traffic to your site. Anything you do online is essentially going to end up in a search engine anyway and how you position this fact to work for your long-term search engine promotion strategy can add depth to your overall search engine visibility.

Broadening your one dimensional perspective of traffic such as just relying on search engines and keywords lessens your dependency on any one method. Type in traffic (those who use keywords directly to reach your site) are only a small percentage of the overall goal. The goal is to appeal to anyone who types in anything related to your site or any other related topic, but that requires strategic positioning, which is another article in it’s entirety.

Understanding your Audience – Respect the individual traits each prospects brings to the table.

There are however, different types of traffic that each have their own habits, characteristics and needs. Someone sipping on a cup of coffee and thumbing through a social media sight who found your site may not have the same impact on conversion as a consumer with a very specific task in mind who is looking for your products or services. Each however, must be taken into account as part of your overall broad range SEO campaign.

Engagement time, frequency and the volume of traffic has proven to be a key metric in how organic rankings are dished out. It is not just enough to have a great page and build links, people must actually visit it to maintain a high organic position.

The only instance where this is not the case is if the traffic volume is marginal at best for the said term. However, for competitive phrases, here today gone tomorrow is the way of life unless you realize stickiness, usability and design matter equally as much as rankings.

The conclusion, search engine promotion is great, but don’t forget that people are multi-faceted and unique specimens, so you must vary your approach vector with distinct content, test different landing pages through multivariate A / B Split tests to see which have the highest conversion. While constantly looking for new ways to re-brand yourself business in a more dynamic light.

Fearless Pursuit of Change – Don’t be afraid to break the mold

Above all break away from the “me too” mentality (search engines and humans alike ignore bland content) and experiment with provocative new advertising marketing and promotional methods to reach new clients.

The upside is huge, the downside only exists if your competition has already beat you to the punch. So, broaden your scope of promotion and how you use search engines or your likely to just be another search result stuck on page 5 in limbo of the major search engines waiting for someone to go that deep (past the 2nd page) to find your link and click it. 

About Jeffrey_Smith

In 2006, Jeffrey Smith founded SEO Design Solutions (An SEO Provider who now develops SEO Software for WordPress).

Jeffrey has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and marketing strategies to increase rankings, revenue and reach.

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