My SMX West Experience and Pitching the Business Value of SEO

by Hamlet Batista | March 05, 2008 | 4 Comments

I haven’t been blogging as often as usual lately and it’s about time I get back on track. I attended my first search marketing conference last week. I do not consider myself much of a conference-goer and I am not really much of an extrovert. Previously, I’d been to only two conferences—JavaOne in 2003, but that was before I fell in love with Python and had the team port all the server-side code to Python/Django—and LISA ’04 (Large Installation System Administration), a conference for Linux/Unix system administrators. I was tempted to go to one of the webmaster conferences, too, but I never saw much benefit in sharing tips and techniques with potential competitors. That was before I started blogging and began to understand the value of sharing, building authority and trust. Boy, after going to SMX West, I realize I have so much catching up to do in terms of networking!

This conference was particularly important for me because I wanted to use SMX West to help launch our flagship product, RankSense. We have worked on the software for more than three years (including several months of beta testing) and I think SMX was the just the right place for its debut. The first day I had to work with my team in final preparations for the booth, and the other two days I ended up staying on to answer questions and speak with guests, so I was not able to attend all the conference sessions. But I met a lot of wonderful people with whom I have exchanged emails, phone calls or instant messages, or whose quality work I simply enjoy online. Thanks to all of you, the conference was big success.

Although I was not able to attend the sessions, which from what I heard were extremely helpful, I did learn something very important. While I began by explaining the value of RankSense to people visiting the booth, on many occasions I had to back up and explain the value of SEO. Many folks I spoke with were unfamiliar with organic SEO because they primarily did pay-per-click (PPC) or were completely new to search marketing (some were coming from email marketing or other online marketing disciplines). I learned to perfect a pitch that worked very well, and I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you.

Here is how I explained the business value of SEO…

If there were no SEOs

Let me tell you the hard but honest truth: You don’t need SEO to rank highly in search engines. If you write high-quality content consistently and that content is link-worthy, the content will rank in the search engines. Period. Why? If this weren’t the case, search engines would be broken; it is their job to make sure that good content ranks first.

“So,” asks the conference-goer, “why do I need to hire an SEO or to optimize my site at all?” The short answer is that, without SEO, you have absolutely no control over what terms your content will rank for. Without SEO, you are leaving it up to Google to figure out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in most cases. But if you want more than just visitors—if your aim to have users who take action, buy your product, download your software, sign up for your newsletter—you need to put serious effort into targeting the right keywords, the ones that will send the most qualified visitors to your site.

The longer answer is that there are so many ways to improve search traffic to your site that it is simply impossible to pretend that it can happen automatically with no optimization. Personally, I see SEO as anything you can do to maximize the quality and the quantity of the traffic you get from a search engine using many different strategies. These include:

  1. Improving the keyword use in the content so that rankings move up to the first page of search results for non-competitive keywords.
  2. Making the page focus on more profitable keywords.
  3. Creating new content that contains additional, relevant keywords.
  4. Obtaining more links to the site or improving the site structure in order to get more pages into the search engine index (and hence more search referrals from additional long-tail queries).
  5. Improving the title and descriptions for higher click-through in the search results.
  6. Removing duplicate content issues to get more content indexed.
  7. Removing canonicalization issues to improve link juice distribution and help get the crawler to visit more pages.
  8. Removing broken links so that search engine robots can find all pages of the site.
  9. Fixing bad web server configurations.
  10. And so many more, it’s impossible to name them all!

There is no perfect optimization; there is always room for improvement. At the same time, business situations and search engine formulas change, and so do your optimization needs.

For those who already had PPC experience, it was far simpler to explain the value of SEO. I just pointed out that they already have to manage their campaigns and find the best performing keywords, ads and landing pages for a reason. Those same PPC optimization concepts apply to SEO.

How do you explain the value of SEO to your clients? As usual, please let me know what you think in the comments.

Cheers, and thanks again to everyone we met at SMX!

Hamlet Batista

Chief Executive Officer

Hamlet Batista is CEO and founder of RankSense, an agile SEO platform for online retailers and manufacturers. He holds US patents on innovative SEO technologies, started doing SEO as a successful affiliate marketer back in 2002, and believes great SEO results should not take 6 months

4

REPLIES

Try our SEO automation tool for free!

RankSense automatically creates search snippets using advanced natural language generation. Get your free trial today.

OUR BLOG

Latest news and tactics

What do you do when you’re losing organic traffic and you don’t know why?

Getting Started with NLP and Python for SEO [Webinar]

Custom Python scripts are much more customizable than Excel spreadsheets.  This is good news for SEOs — this can lead to optimization opportunities and low-hanging fruit.  One way you can use Python to uncover these opportunities is by pairing it with natural language processing. This way, you can match how your audience searches with your...

READ POST
Making it easier to implement SEO changes on your website

Changes to the RankSense SEO rules interface

As we continue to improve the RankSense app for Cloudflare, we are always working to make the app more intuitive and easy to use. I'm pleased to share that we have made significant changes to our SEO rules interface in the settings tab of our app. It is now easier to publish multiple rules sheets and to see which changes have not yet been published to production.

READ POST

How to Find Content Gaps at Scale: Atrapalo vs Skyscanner

For the following Ranksense Webinar, we were joined by Antoine Eripret, who works at Liligo as an SEO lead. Liligo.com is a travel search engine which instantly searches all available flight, bus and train prices on an exhaustive number of travel sites such as online travel agencies, major and low-cost airlines and tour-operators. In this...

READ POST

Exciting News!
seoClarity acquires RankSense

X