Recently, Seth Godin published a blog post called Marketing in Four Steps. When we read it, we had a little déjà vu moment, like why does this sound so familiar? Then it hit us—oh yeah, these are pretty much the same steps you need to follow for SEO success too. Except with SEO, we’d break it down more like this:
-
Tell Your Story
Everybody’s got a story, and personal stories are what members of the human race resonate with most. Since your targeted customer is (presumably) human, they’re looking for stories they can connect with. Make sure yours is one.
Whether you’re a plastic surgeon who got in the game for the sheer satisfaction of helping patients bring out the best in their appearance or you’re a lawyer who hung up their shingle in an effort to finally right the wrongs of the little guy, your audience wants to glimpse the big picture of why you’re in business.
-
Build Something Worthwhile
You know what we’re about to say, right? If you build it, they will come? As Field of Dreams clearly demonstrated, besides the “if you build it” part, you have to build something meaningful and worthwhile. Like your story, your website—or e-book, or newsletter, or whatever you create—needs to connect with your audience on a deeper level.
Hopping back to Step 1 for a sec, imagine if a company’s story boils down to “Yeah, we dunno, we just figured this’d be a solid way to pay ourselves awesome salaries.” Not a whole lot of customers are going to feel inspired by that. So dig deeper to find the underlying meaning behind your business, and build a website/product/service that represents those goals.
-
Market Your Worthwhile Thing to Your Audience
Once you’ve created your proverbial baseball field, you’ve got to get the word out there, and you’ve got to do it in the right way. Every company’s success is dependent on truly understanding your target market, and optimizing your website properly ensures that the ideal audience will be able to find your product or service when they search online.
Step 3 includes about a million little sub-steps that we’re not going to get into here (stuff like keyword ranking and web design and picking the perfect hashtags) that all add up to improving your SEO. The more visible you are to search engines, the more visible you’ll become to the prospective customers who are looking for a business just like yours.
-
Keep Doing It
Compelling story? Check. Meaningful metaphorical baseball field in the form of a kick-ass website? Check. Figured out how to get folks to drive over to your metaphorical baseball field from all across the nation? Roger that. Now what?
Well, just keep doing what you’re doing. Technically, this is SEM (search engine marketing) and not SEO, but we’re adding it to the list anyway because it’s an essential part of the process. Making all the right SEO moves can take months to start paying off, so hanging in there and plugging away is a key part of achieving eventual SEO success. In other words, keep up the Kevin Costner-like level of faith, and know that if you build it, they will definitely come.