SEO Alignment…

When I talk to clients, I talk a lot about SEO alignment. This refers to the functional aspects of on and offline marketing activity integrating.  Essentially it’s how the direct and indirect marketing channels pull together to market the website, avoid SEO being a stand-alone activity, and provide an informed picture to search engines.

SEO Alignment

This needn’t be excessively pushy or spammy, nor need it be a search engine marketers headache, but provided the search consultant asks the right questions and are provided with the business and marketing information then plans can be put in place.

SEO Planning

The analysis and marketing plan is one of my favourite aspects of working in search marketing, for good reasons. The analysis is the detective work: highlighting the current situation, trouble areas and the very best opportunities to market the website online. The search marketing plan is essentially building this into a road-map of activity, and on a micro-level, creating a to-do list that will improve the site’s performance.

The IT and Marketing Case

Search engine optimisation is a fascinating merger of technical I.T. skills and marketing prowess. What we tend to see from successful SEO specialists is that the more effective the SEO’s marketing approach is, the better the return on investment from the technical input. This essentially means that optimising websites is not simply about engineering them for search engines, but rather that a sprinkle of marketing flare can go a long way.

Although, don’t let marketing flare and technical aspects of web dev or SEO collide by treating them as independent functions.  Let them run in a way that helps them act as a catalyst for progress for one another by providing them with overlapping agendas.  An example of this would be challenging them to work on creating the optimal, accessible website structure for users and bots.

So day-to-day, how can this be applied?

To integrate SEO, marketing and IT, it’s really a case of each area of the business (if unique) knowing the what’s and the how’s of everything. Sometimes an SEO specialist can help simply by integrating and capitalising on what is already there. It’s vital to draw marketing information from as many parts of the business as possible, maybe start by asking:

• What is the website’s purpose as part of the business or organisation? Brand-building, sales, social media / newsletter-sign-ups, educational, post-sale support, cross-selling, affiliate, etc…?
• Who are the ideal visitors? Ideal customer behaviour?
• Access to the current market research and plan?
• Are there other websites that the company owns?
• Does the company have other business partnerships, affiliates?
• SEO project team – company integration as opposed to simply the SEO consultant?

Integrating the technical and analytical activity, along with marketing flare and planning, become the new, qualitative ranking factors, where rankings can be shown to increase exponentially if all items are pulled together…SEO alignment.