brand thinking blog

Brand Thinking Blog

Recent Posts

  • The Perils of SEO

    By

    Posted on February 14, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    By now even your grandmother has seen the New York Times Sunday article on “Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets“, and it’s made even the search savvy among us shake our heads in disgust. It seems that in every meeting I attend these days SEO is raised as a topic, and there are a fair number of folks at the table who know enough to be dangerous. I field questions from, “What is SEO, and why should I care about it?” to “I’ve already optimized my tags and URLS; tell me why I should care about links.”

    SEO is a bit like the engineering major down the hall from you in college: brilliant, secretive and socially awkward. Google’s search algorithm is a concoction of secret ingredients that are vital to the success of your firm, but how one goes about playing nice with them is often an exercise in futility. And to hear that the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are hiring guns to expose how the system is being gamed makes one just want to throw in the towel on search. It’s tough to play a game where the rules always change and even more difficult to want to play when one player, Google, seems to be holding all the cards.

    So, what’s a marketer to do? First, breathe. Search optimization doesn’t happen overnight (at least not yet). Circle the wagons and figure out who’s in charge of SEO for your firm. Then make sure that that person has access to good advice. As even huge companies like J.C.Penney have learned, there’s a gaggle of SEO quacks out there. And finally, take the time to read and understand–or have someone walk you through–the SEO reports you receive. You should be getting updates monthly, and it should be crystal clear the results you’re seeing and what actions were taken on your behalf.

    But turning a blind eye to SEO or worse ignoring it, is no longer an option: on average, the first result on Google receives 34% of the clicks whereas the second listing receives less than half that number of clicks. For more on how buyers of professional service search, download our groundbreaking research.

    Tags:
    , , , ,  


    Write a comment





Brand Thinkers

Gayatri Bhalla

Gayatri Bhalla, Principal of Interactive Marketing, has over a dozen years of experience in the interactive marketing and strategy disciplines. She brings a depth of understanding and experience with new media platforms and knows how to marry marketing with meaningful technologies.

Connect With Us