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SEO Is NOT A Marketing Strategy

by danr62
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
SEO is not, and never should be considered to be a marketing strategy.

At it's best, it is a marketing tactic.

What's the difference?

If you know Chess at all, you understand that your strategy for any given game is at the core of every move you make. Even before the game begins, you know what your strategy is and you know how your opponent is likely to respond to your moves. As the game progresses you will adapt your strategy to suit the situations that arise.

Tactics, on the other hand, compliment strategy. These are short term opportunities to exploit a weakness in your opponent's position. Using these tactics effectively can help you gain an upper hand.

SEO is only one component to an online marketing campaign. Some would even say it's not a component, but a bonus.

If your entire business is built around your ability to rank your own sites or the sites of others, you are standing on shaky ground. You are not a marketer, but a tactician.

And even the best tactics will be smashed by a well laid strategy.
#marketing #seo #strategy
  • Profile picture of the author SAV46E
    Your marketing strategy is the pillars that hold up your business. Tactics such as SEO strengthen these pillars but you got to have many pillars there in the first place.
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  • Profile picture of the author TheProgrammer
    so you mean SEO is just a roughly game of players? how can you play major marketing game without players?
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  • Profile picture of the author sovereignn
    SEM!

    But really if you want a real online presence you'll need to do a lot more than just SEO

    Social marketing... PPC... Paid Ads... SO ON!
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Originally Posted by danr62 View Post

    If your entire business is built around your ability to rank your own sites or the sites of others, you are standing on shaky ground. You are not a marketer, but a tactician.
    Semantics never make for good overall points. Yes my business is BUILT AROUND (key phrase) ranking and its on very solid ground. Why? because when I rank a site I build a customer base complete with Word of mouth and repeat traffic. IF I lose the rank I still have the word of mouth traffic , the customer I acquired and the repeat returning traffic. Please provide any avenue of advertising and marketing that can not be affected by changes to that market. If search engine marketing is just search engine tactics then there are no marketing strategies at all but just tactics.

    Now I get your overall point but why focus exclusively around SEO not being a Strategy when no single step of a business is a strategy. Building a list has its unsubscribe rates, bought ads have their conversion problems particularly the more people see the ads, Media buys can be drastically affected by price swings so its the same.

    Now if your strategy is to bring in a hundred thousand potential customers and build a customer base from that then its doable by SEO as long as that strategy does not require you to keep getting the traffic and business from new searches each month but ultimately relies as most business do on returning customers.
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  • Profile picture of the author Complex
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    • Profile picture of the author danr62
      Originally Posted by Complex View Post

      LOL, tell that to the MANY billion dollar business that SEO all day long as part of their overall strategy.

      Problem is the anti-SEO crowd doesn't know that they do that. They just think that they naturally rank for everything that they do. They don't know that sponsored blog campaigns to boost rank go on every single day of the week. Just because you don't get it, doesn't mean that they don't get it.

      You can come up with a theoretical argument all you want to against SEO and it might sound good... but that is all it is. A theoretical argument that sounds good. Nothing more than that.

      Your statement might have been relevant in the '90's... not in 2012.

      There is a reason why the large insurance companies that are actually comprised of hundreds of little companies all use the websites of the little companies to link back to the mother site with carefully chosen anchor text. It's to boost rank. (Most people don't know that because you have to know both the link profile and the corporate structure of the mother company)

      There is a reason why MTV will link to Comedy Central with anchor text. Same company owns both stations and they are using their own network to boost rank. Bet you didn't know that was SEO, did ya?

      There is a reason why Ask Men.com ranks well for everything related to men and it might have something to do with the fact that they are owned by NewsCorp and get syndicated on Fox News' website. Another example of SEO that most people don't see... because they don't know that Newscorp owns both Fox and Ask Men.

      It's easy to argue against SEO when you don't know what SEO is. If you think that SEO = wikilink blasts and the like, you don't know SEO. If you did, you would eat your words pretty quickly.

      A comprehensive SEO strategy includes things like press releases, video submissions, social profiles, well placed and distributed articles, web 2.0s, satellite sites, carefully selected partner links, etc.

      Try to argue against a game plan like that and I did not even go past the first month of a comprehensive SEO plan, lol.

      An SEO that understands the overall importance of getting your links out there in all the right places does a lot of things that are not considered "SEO" by the anti SEOrs but are totally SEO because it helps boost rank AND awareness which is the catalyst for gaining natural links and traffic.

      A good SEO will probably get like 25-50% of their traffic from the search engines (maybe less) and the rest comes from where we put the links... in front of traffic and in a way to boost rank.

      It's easy to argue against bad SEO or limited SEO, hard to argue against comprehensive SEO. (lol, what's my keyword density for SEO in this post ) It's much better to educate yourself on the position you are arguing against, and if you did, you might just change your tune.

      Best thing that you can do is to learn the game plan of a corporate site and learn the structure of that corporation and then track down their backlinks. All of those sites that "naturally rank well" sure do have a lot of help from the links on their networks that are anchored for the terms they want to rank for.

      Hmmm. what is that called again?

      Scratch that. You are right. Those billion dollar businesses don't know 1/10 of what the article syndicators in the main forum know about marketing. / heavy, heavy sarcasm

      I think you misunderstood the intent of my OP. The type of SEO you just described is not what I was talking about at all. You yourself said that a good SEO will get the majority of their traffic from sources other than the search engines, and that is exactly as it should be.
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  • Profile picture of the author JKflipflop
    Yes. I totally agree. In fact, certain service providers label the concept of SEM as holistic "Online Branding" - a program which enhances overall web presence and therefore, there are opportunities manifold to start viral campaigns for such well branded companies/firms/individuals.
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