SEO FOR MARKETERS

Integrating SEO to Social Media, Brand, and Content

June

2009Gregg Holtsclaw Director, Online MarketingDelphic Sage

SEO for Marketers White Paper

June 2009

INTEGRATING SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) suffers from an identity problem. In most organizations, SEO is,rightfully, considered to be a marketing tactic. Whether that notion stems from SEO being a hot buzz

word, or from the notion that it is “snake

oil,”

the simple fact is; SEO is a marketing tactic. And as, any multi-channel retailer can attest too, a sales channel. And SEO is now a core competency that every single organization must staff for - either internally or outsourced.Is calling SEO a core competency too bold? No. In fact, this white paper will explore first why SEO isnow a core competency that must be integrated and then explain ways to integrate SEO into threeareas of your marketing mix: brand, content and social media. While exploring SEO integration withpaid search and PR are also appropriate to discuss, this whitepaper will stay limited to brand, content,and social media for the sake of brevity. It is likely that we will post some updated thoughts on theDelphic Sage blog, located at http://www.delphicsage.com/blog. In summary, we will be looking at why SEO is a core competency. Next, we will look at how tointegrate SEO within brand, content plans, and social media activities to achieve the best resultspossible.

SEO IS NOW A CORE COMPETENCY

In the distant past, SEO was largely considered a P/L line item to assuage the fears of a C-levelexecutive who read an article

and didn’t want to be left behind by a new tactic. In some cases,

depending on how convincing the person handling analytics for an organization was, it might haveeven become high profile. In the recent past, SEO was considered to be a mystical journey, but one

that was necessary for “traffic.” In the present, SEO has finally been elevated to at least a necessary

tactic in the thought leadership of most organizations and in many organizations it is becoming vitalto integrate SEO into all marketing activities. In 2008, the merging of numerous technologies withinOmniture showed a strong enterprise analytics belief in SEO, with tools being ingrained in Test andTarget to measure SEO efforts. Their product release in February of 2009 further expanded their

software’s capabilities. Never one to be a slouch, Google Analytics finally benefitted from a number of

articles on a variety of sites, including Searchengineland.com explaining marrying analytics and SEO-and conveniently using Google Analytics to do so.In fact, without a doubt, there has been an explosion in SEO efforts for companies of all sizes,including companies who almost solely are relying on SEO as their principal marketing vehicle because of a perception of SEO being low cost, long-lasting, and of course, effective. As MarketingSherpa points out in their 2009 Searchmarketing Benchmarking Guide; global spend is expanding (up30%) even in the economic downturn for search. The screaming sub-

header should be “ BECAUSE IT

SEO for Marketers White Paper

June 2009

WORKS.” The new face of

SEO is making it a core competency and integrating it into marketingefforts. Rather than trying to participate in reputation management to protect your brand, or usingSEO to garner a small bump in traffic, or even putting a checkmark on SEO as a side benefit of SocialMedia-SEO must be viewed as an integral focal point to all marketing efforts for three reasons.The three reasons that SEO must be viewed as a core competency are:



Duplication of effort.

Having a copywriter writer copy, getting the copy to a junior level SEOstrategist, sending it back to the writer or a web producer, and then having the edited copy optimizedagain is terribly inefficient. The duplication of effort is both a time and budget killer.



Fiscal Savings.

Extra hands and extra steps eat budget. More importantly, slowdowns in creationcreate slowdowns in timelines, and other priorities become time sinks, which in turn, burns budgetwithout results.



Effectiveness.

Have a plan. Execute the plan. Simple to say, but how many people can effectivelyexecute when there are more meetings and proposals than blocks of time set aside to execute?

BRANDING AND SEO

The first step you should take in implementing SEO is integrating SEO into your branding plan-actively. If you view SEO as something that only is a tool to drive Reputation Management, you might want to reconsider you stance.Picture this, it is 6:30 a.m. Monday morning and you are happily oversleeping your alarm, when yousee an incoming phone call. Who would call you at 6:30? It might just be your boss calling to let you

know that they discovered over the weekend that a search for “yourcompanyname” resulted in three of

the first page results being negative blog posts about your customer service, and that it needs to befixed, immediately. By 8, you are in the office and grumbling over coffee with a coworker that the

problem didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be solved overnight

-and off you go to build links and write articles that you hope get distributed. If you are lucky, in a few weeks you will still be employed,and those articles will be buried. You can now rest until the next 6:30 a.m. call.Picture a second, and even stranger yet common, scenario. Imagine that you have been given advice via your outsourced SEO company to not worry about building your brand, as you have been doingthat all along, but instead to worry about what moves the revenue needle. That, what you care about

are, in fact, converting keywords and that brands don’t matter anymore. Although that seems

preposterous, you will find a number of articles on fairly high profile sites that argue exactly that.