Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing in the mod­ern space is not just tech­ni­cal search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) or tac­tics. It’s the strat­e­gy of under­stand­ing who your sales tar­gets are and align­ing the mar­ket­ing needs so edi­to­r­i­al and con­tent cre­ation can tar­get those peo­ple at the key moments of the con­sumer deci­sion jour­ney (aware­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion, eval­u­a­tion, and pur­chase).

When you’re cre­at­ing a cul­ture of dig­i­tal busi­ness and try­ing to opti­mize for your audi­ence online, none of the SEO con­cepts we talk about are autonomous. And they go much deep­er than just face val­ue.

This is why I stray away from the term SEO in the tra­di­tion­al sense. Because when we approach SEO strate­gi­cal­ly, we’re not opti­miz­ing for the search engines, we’re opti­miz­ing for our audi­ence.

Peo­ple want rela­tion­ships. They want to know who they’re talk­ing with when they’re buy­ing, which is why it’s impor­tant to devel­op a pro­file that res­onates with your audi­ence.

Why A Strategic SEO Approach Beats A Tactical SEO Approach

This image bril­liant­ly illus­trates the dif­fer­ences between tac­ti­cal and strate­gic SEO:

Image Cred­it: Matt Storms/LinkedIn

• You can get good and fast SEO results, but it takes com­mit­ment and resources.
• You can get good and cheap SEO results, but the results are going to be slow and ROI is going to take a long time.
• You can get fast and cheap SEO results, but when you get fast and cheap, you’re talk­ing about tac­tics.

Tac­tics, as your foun­da­tion, run the risk of expi­ra­tion in val­ue when a search engine changes its algo­rithm.

Tac­ti­cal SEO can work for a time, but it’s dan­ger­ous to invest in short-term tac­tics rather than embrac­ing a con­sumer-cen­tric strat­e­gy that can deliv­er real busi­ness results in the long term.

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is no longer just tech­ni­cal. Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is the align­ment of edi­to­r­i­al to cre­ate aware­ness in an area in which sales is try­ing to tar­get. It’s about iden­ti­fy­ing and build­ing an audi­ence with prop­er con­tent.

Optimizing Keywords For Your Audience

A great place to start trans­form­ing your com­mon SEO tac­tics is with your key­word research. Look at your research from an audi­ence opti­miza­tion view ver­sus a search engine per­spec­tive.

Let’s say you do in-house mar­ket­ing for a nation­al house paint man­u­fac­tur­er, and you’ve launched a cam­paign to opti­mize for your prod­ucts online.

Your team has put in all the leg­work on your key­word research. They’ve used key­word tools, they’ve looked at your website’s refer­ring key­words in ana­lyt­ics, com­piled data from Google Trends, and so on.

You cre­at­ed a robust, nice­ly orga­nized key­word list that has all your brand­ed terms, head terms, and long-tail terms.

You and your team have done your best. But it’s still only your best guess. And that’s OK – ini­tial­ly.

There’s one prob­lem. Your team pre­sumed that if peo­ple need­ed paint for their homes, the key­words they would use in their queries would be relat­ed to buy­ing paint.

But what your team didn’t know is that the inter­est for your prod­uct actu­al­ly began gen­er­at­ing long before the “buy” part, when your tar­get audi­ence began think­ing in terms of home remod­el­ing.

Key­word research sole­ly with search traf­fic in mind leads to one-dimen­sion­al con­tent. It doesn’t touch your audi­ence at every stage of the pur­chase cycle, and it doesn’t speak to them.

Your team may have been able to uncov­er addi­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­nect, had they gone beyond the tra­di­tion­al key­word research.

If they had worked hard­er to get into the minds of the audi­ence, the result­ing key­word set and con­tent would be much rich­er.

Luck­i­ly, key­word research and oth­er SEO com­po­nents are iter­a­tive process­es that improve over time. They become bet­ter the more you lis­ten and the more you engage with your com­mu­ni­ty.

Watch Out For Task Lists As Solutions

If SEO con­sul­tants or agen­cies are sell­ing you task lists of things you need to do to “be opti­mized,” you’re buy­ing a tac­ti­cal approach ver­sus strate­gic.

The tactical/technical side of SEO, with­out the robust con­tent com­po­nents, is like putting dirty gas in a great auto­mo­bile. You’re going to get ter­ri­ble mileage.

Don’t get me wrong; we all have to start some­where. But, there is no one set of tasks you can do that will save the day with­in your dig­i­tal busi­ness plan, and then be done for good.

And if you keep fol­low­ing this same task list, it’ll get you nowhere. Insan­i­ty is repeat­ing the same thing and expect­ing dif­fer­ent results.

Dig­i­tal busi­ness is not lin­ear; it’s sys­tem­at­ic. It’s an evo­lu­tion­ary loop.

After the first cycle of opti­miza­tion, your busi­ness needs to be able to take all the data from every depart­ment, all the things you’ve learned, all the mis­takes you’ve made, and all the wins, and apply them to the next cycle of SEO, where you essen­tial­ly start over again.

In the dig­i­tal busi­ness realm, improve­ments nev­er end. You need to make sure you’re hav­ing smart con­ver­sa­tions about mul­ti­ple met­rics to assess the suc­cess of your con­tent, and your social vis­i­bil­i­ty and engage­ment.

Being Strategic Means Being Flexible

Today, most com­pa­nies aren’t yet ready for this dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Com­pa­nies must embrace this change from the top down – to engage employ­ees, change their per­spec­tive, and enable the dif­fer­ences between busi­ness units to the advan­tage of the com­pa­ny, rather than con­tin­u­ing to silo them.

To stay rel­e­vant, com­pa­nies must be flex­i­ble enough to embrace change. You’ll see com­pa­nies at a stand­still when depart­ments become too attached to their way of doing things – and that includes the way they view SEO.

Don’t be left behind with old tech­nol­o­gy, old ways of doing things, old tac­ti­cal approach­es while your com­pe­ti­tion embraces the future.

When you think strat­e­gy, it’s not just about how you will get there – it’s about how you will be among the first to get there and stay there.

Key Takeaways

• Take a look at the “why” behind the search engine opti­miza­tion tac­tics you per­form to get at the heart of their pur­pose.
• There is no “one set of tasks” that will save the day with­in your dig­i­tal busi­ness plan. Dig­i­tal busi­ness is not lin­ear; it’s an evo­lu­tion­ary loop.
• Liv­ing with­in tac­tics cre­ates a stand­still approach while your com­pe­ti­tion embraces the ever-chang­ing future.

Do you view SEO as a strate­gic, con­sumer-cen­tric approach?