Original SEO Success Pyramid Post
Idea for the Pyramid taken from John Wooden’s “Pyramid For Success”
The Foundation (bottom row of pyramid): about you & your company.
Commitment: Your team must be fully engaged and devoted to executing your plan. CEO needs to buy into SEO plan as well as Marketing & PR.
Planning: What are your goals? What’s needed to reach them? How will you determine success? Questions that need to be asked: Why are we doing this? What strategies / tactics? Who will make it happen? How will we measure success?
Product / Service. Great search marketing won’t hide the fact that you have a lousy product or service.
Education: Access to current, intelligent information is a must in this ever-changing industry. Top online websites: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Guide, SEOmoz, Sphinn
Patience: Search Marketing is a long-term process. Overnight success is extremely rare.
First Steps (next level up the pyramid):
Design / Usability: Providing a great user experience should be part of your marketing plan. If you don’t have this down, people are going to leave your site & not convert. Many business owners don’t have a clue on what is good (e.g. Flash Intros)
Keyword Research: You need to know and use the terms searchers use. Not always obvious…do the research! Where: Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker & Wordze.
Analytics: Without analytics, how will you know what’s working and what’s not? Need to measure your success.
Tools: The right tools can give you an advantage over your competitors. Also need to know how to interpret that data. E.g. Firefox / SEO for Firefox Plugin, SEODigger, Link Diagnosis & Yahoo Site Explorer
Nuts & Bolts (next level up):
Crawlability: Search engines can’t rank pages that they can’t crawl. Common problems: Incorrect robots.txt, Session ID’s, Dynamic Variables, Poor Linking & Navigational Structure, Excessive Code.
Content: Users want it. Search Engines Need it. Search Marketing Success demands it. Content can come in many forms (e.g. articles, F.A.Q., Blogs (which attract reader comments & links), videos, user generated content.
Links: Links tell search engines how popular your content is. Anchor text is key.
Reaching Out (next level up):
Social / Local Findability: Engage with your customers on local & social sites (such as Flickr, Placeblogger, Yelp, Google Maps, Yahoo Local, City Search.
Reputation Management: Extremely Important (Merchant Circle Example)
What It’s All About (top level):
Trust: Trust from users and search engines is imperative for long-term success. Search engines know your business name, contact info, where you bought it, length of registration, where you host, what other sites you have, etc. They know how many pages on your site, when you add new ones, when you update them, who you link to, who links to you, how often you add links, how often you earn links, etc.
How do you build trust? All the building blocks in the pyramid lead to building trust.
About Matt McGee
My name’s Matt, and I’m currently a free agent search marketer. I’m open to new job opportunities or freelance consulting opportunities. Learn more here.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
That’s funny- I’m a huge John Wooden fan, and love the SEO pyramid- but I just knocked it down… I was working on our SEO process diagrams for our SEM dept. and crossed out a bunch of his pyramid elements 😉 It ended up looking more like an SEO blob, which isn’t as cool as a pyramid, but I came up with a new thing which is more like an SEO Infinity thing, still working on it…