17 September 2009
How not "getting" the benefits of SEO can cause you to miss out on some of the most powerful marketing tools around.

As an SEO professional, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are still businesses out there that really don’t “get” SEO. When you spend your time reading up on the subject, exchanging tweets and blog posts with other professionals and building a search engine presence for your business and those of your clients, the process, and the benefits, seem obvious.

But not everyone sees it that way.

This was brought home in particular style yesterday when I was taking a look at the forums of an online market site. Some sellers were in panic, literally, because of a problem with their Google feeds. Thinking to ease their pain I suggested there might be other avenues to explore – which are free – to build links for key terms to their online shop and so boost their natural rankings for those terms.

The point here is that investing effort in raising the profile of their outlet would generate traffic, would boost visibility in all search engines (not just Big G) and such visibility doesn’t depend on a functioning feed – it’s crash-proof. To me, that’s the proverbial “no-brainer”.

But I was surprised by the hostile reception to this idea. “Twitter only reaches my followers” one person complained. “I don’t have the time to write original content all over the place” complained another “and anyway, Google’s the only one worth bothering about.”

The second response amounts to “I can’t be bothered to sell the benefits of my product” and is akin to a shop keeper who thinks dressing his window is a waste of time – because surely the name over the door will be enough, right? The first response about Twitter shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the marketing power of that application.

If I post a tweet containing a key business phrase I almost always pick up a few new followers. Yesterday I tweeted about a press release that was carried by the local press and sure enough two new followers jumped on it and now follow my Tweets. I don’t know them; I didn’t send them unsolicited mail. They followed because they saw something that interested them (might be the marketing side of things, might be the product – either is good) and now when I Tweet they’ll look BECAUSE THEY ARE INTERESTED. Now tell me that this isn’t the sort of person you want to keep updated about your product and special offers?

The Holy Grail of marketing has always been to put your product or service in front of the very people who want or need to buy it. The raft of free online applications now, of which Twitter, Facebook and Squidoo are but a few, do precisely that because you put your product out there and the people who are interested take the time to take an interest – they choose to do this themselves – and from then on you have your target audience and that’s when you get to build trust and a relationship with them.

So not only do you raise the profile of your selling site in the search engines, so that people can find you through any number of locations, but you gain a willing customer base in the process.

And at that point a broken Google feed isn’t the end of the world!