However, there is much confusion and misconception in Enterprise Business today about what strategies, techniques and tactics are actually used in the SEO process. One of my directors recently described SEO as "sprinkling keywords on a website to make it rank for Google." Yikes!
Statements like that prove the need for Enterprise environments to learn more about the value of including SEO as the bedrock of any digital project and how to incorporate SEO into a Holistic Marketing approach.
I recently pulled from my favorite SEO blog, Search Engine Land, some information to build an SEO Guide for my office to help Enterprise business better understand how SEO is about many things, all at once: Content, Communications, Technical Development, and Elegance in Coding, Usability, Linking Strategy, Social and Mobile.
In this series of blogs, I hope to help bring a better understanding of the SEO process, the cross-functional roles involved, and the need for technical understanding at the enterprise level to better engage SEO at the right time when implementing any new digital project.
What is SEO?
At its very base, SEO is defined as: Search engine optimization (SEO) is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) -- including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other internal site search engines.
This definition needs so much more detail to explain all that SEO entails. It's juggling content, technology, analytics, UX, social relationships, linking strategy and so much more!
My initial crude chart to the right, trying to break SEO strategy into digestible pieces, doesn’t quite give the full picture of what SEO's juggle either.
Optimizing Search can mean optimizing many different digital platforms including:
- External Search Engines – External search engines crawl the entire Internet to provide relevant information based on keyword searches: Google, Bing, Yahoo
- Social Media Search - Social Media specific search engines provide optimized content on sites like: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter
- Internal Search Engines – Internal search engines provide domain-specific search results: SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Pivot, Salesforce, Endeca, etc.
To further illustrate all of the various strategies used in the SEO process, Search Engine Land has a wonderful comprehensive Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors, which shows all of the various factors that play into search optimization.
Holistic Marketing
Holistic Marketing is the latest way to define SEO in the article, The Only Way To Be Successful At SEO: Take A Holistic Approach, shows how SEO has grown from a simple strategy into an all-encompassing digital bedrock.
In today's Enterprise Business and the world of Digital Experience we all live in, there is a need to properly curate data in technologically sound ways so that others can find that source of knowledge, that information, not matter what the platform.
"Having synergy between your different marketing channels will not just help SEO, but it also will boost your overall marketing efforts by allowing you to capitalize on all opportunities. It will also allow you to better tailor your marketing efforts toward building a brand that is strong regardless of how any single marketing channel performs." - Tony Edward
Today's SEO's are much more than simple keyword generators who “sprinkle keywords” willy-nilly on a site to make it rank for Google. We know how to organize site architecture, how to inspire elegance in coding practices, how to create online relationships and build on those connections with linking strategies, how to analyze data and build meaningful dashboards to present that data.....and yes, we still know how to boil down content to its essence and listen to the audience to understand what people want when searching and how to get them there.
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