Explaining SEO to Businesses Owners: Five Great Analogies
Online marketing companies often struggle to describe Search Engine Optimization to prospective customers. Typical conversations include a discussion on "on-page" search engine optimization and "off-page" SEO. The process should always include a detailed analysis of a website's HTML code. Off-page SEO encompasses the ways in which the Internet relates back to a website, usually via back-links which are website links that point back to a site. Although the major search engines are constantly updating their ranking algorithms, back-linking, social media exposures and references from quality websites have always been heavily weighted by the search engines.
To this day, the web design industry is still almost exclusively "design driven", and as such, the design process can often have unintended consequences on search engine optimization. This is because design is about the look and feel of a website, not the rank or position of it on the search engines. So we in the web development industry often find ourselves trying to simplify search engine optimization to business owners with limited knowledge on the subject.
It takes 3 types of talent so build a search engine friendly website. The first is the designer. While SEO should always be the end goal, you need to have a great looking website that creates a positive impression and is easy to navigate. Second, you need an SEO-savvy web developer that can convert the digital artwork and convert them into clean, best practices website coding. Finally, you need a search engine expert to manage the entire process and to populate the website with content that is both optimized and presented in a way that will convert to sales or leads.
In practice, however, the designers still drive the entire process. When this happens, the company gets a great looking new site that is hacked together on the back-end. These sites almost never get search engine rank for competitive search terms. The client company then searches for Internet marketing assistance, but the new consultants start at a disadvantage because they have to try and rank a site that is poorly structured and coded.
Then the company gets the bad news: they have to re-code the new website from scratch to get search engine rank - which is what motivated the company to re-develop the site in the first place! As SEO's we need to be able to explain in clear and simple terms why brand new (and often costly) websites do not rank. The following are some popular anecdotes that have been used by a leading Kansas City web design company:
1. The Race Car Driver: This is an effective SEO analogy and may be among the best. To excel on the search engines, you need to have an optimized website that is well structured with search engine friendly coding. Your website is the race car. No matter how fast your car is, it still needs a driver to be able to compete. A skilled driver cannot win with a substandard car, and a poor driver cannot win with a the most advanced race car. This is an ideal analogy for search engine optimization - you need a great driver and a great car to win the race, just like you need a great website and a great Internet marketer succeed with Google. The only difference is that with Google and the other major search engines, the race never ends.
2. New Home Construction: Many prospective clients can identify with the home building process. Web design in particular is very similar to the construction process. In home building, the architects will draft construction plans for the project. This is like the design process where the designer creates website mockups. It is during the website design phase where the business owner can easily modify the artwork. In home building, it's easy to change the floor plan prior to construction, but once construction starts, its very difficult and often expensive to make changes. Website development is the exact same. Once approved web artwork is committed to the coding process, design and layout changes are much more difficult to implement. In web design your search engine optimization professional is like the builder and inspector, making sure that the site has proper coding, structure and usability.
3. Sharp Shooting: The analogy of the sharp shooter is another good one. This one is simple and makes the point clearly and concisely. The world's best sharp shooter is powerless without a great firearm, and a the best firearm on the planet cannot shoot by itself. The same goes for SEO - a perfectly coded website cannot rank itself and a the world's best consulting firm can't do anything without clients and websites to rank.
4. Landscapers: Landscaping may be one of the best web design analogies in terms of the amount of time and effort it takes to design, install and maintain a landscaping plan. After installation, a residential landscape needs periodic watering, pruning, pest control, mulching and fertilization. The regular maintenance aspect of landscaping parallels the ongoing effort that a website needs in order to grow into high natural search engine positions. The process takes time and consultants with digital green thumbs are usually able to provide their clients with much higher search engine visibility that the could have achieved on their own.
5. Fishing: Second to the race car driving analogy, Fishing is one of our favorites on so many levels. The best angle to use for this analogy relates to net fishing. Think of recreational fishers in an area using chum and other luring techniques to draw fish into a body of water. Fishermen use specialized lures, bait and equipment to catch fish one-by-one. This is akin to traditional marketing where companies use mass marketing to target a relatively small group of potential buyers. In SEO, we call this: offline demand creation. As fishermen use all their fancy methods to attract fish, think of a commercial fishing vessel that comes by and scoops up all the fish. This is EXACTLY what SEO does. Consumers see the demand creation by companies on TV, print and radio...then then run to the Internet to research when they are actually ready to make a purchase decision. SEO, when done effectively, enables your company to steal this market share created by your competitors.
Next time you get stuck trying to explain the relationship between online marketing and web development, try using one of these analogies.
To this day, the web design industry is still almost exclusively "design driven", and as such, the design process can often have unintended consequences on search engine optimization. This is because design is about the look and feel of a website, not the rank or position of it on the search engines. So we in the web development industry often find ourselves trying to simplify search engine optimization to business owners with limited knowledge on the subject.
It takes 3 types of talent so build a search engine friendly website. The first is the designer. While SEO should always be the end goal, you need to have a great looking website that creates a positive impression and is easy to navigate. Second, you need an SEO-savvy web developer that can convert the digital artwork and convert them into clean, best practices website coding. Finally, you need a search engine expert to manage the entire process and to populate the website with content that is both optimized and presented in a way that will convert to sales or leads.
In practice, however, the designers still drive the entire process. When this happens, the company gets a great looking new site that is hacked together on the back-end. These sites almost never get search engine rank for competitive search terms. The client company then searches for Internet marketing assistance, but the new consultants start at a disadvantage because they have to try and rank a site that is poorly structured and coded.
Then the company gets the bad news: they have to re-code the new website from scratch to get search engine rank - which is what motivated the company to re-develop the site in the first place! As SEO's we need to be able to explain in clear and simple terms why brand new (and often costly) websites do not rank. The following are some popular anecdotes that have been used by a leading Kansas City web design company:
1. The Race Car Driver: This is an effective SEO analogy and may be among the best. To excel on the search engines, you need to have an optimized website that is well structured with search engine friendly coding. Your website is the race car. No matter how fast your car is, it still needs a driver to be able to compete. A skilled driver cannot win with a substandard car, and a poor driver cannot win with a the most advanced race car. This is an ideal analogy for search engine optimization - you need a great driver and a great car to win the race, just like you need a great website and a great Internet marketer succeed with Google. The only difference is that with Google and the other major search engines, the race never ends.
2. New Home Construction: Many prospective clients can identify with the home building process. Web design in particular is very similar to the construction process. In home building, the architects will draft construction plans for the project. This is like the design process where the designer creates website mockups. It is during the website design phase where the business owner can easily modify the artwork. In home building, it's easy to change the floor plan prior to construction, but once construction starts, its very difficult and often expensive to make changes. Website development is the exact same. Once approved web artwork is committed to the coding process, design and layout changes are much more difficult to implement. In web design your search engine optimization professional is like the builder and inspector, making sure that the site has proper coding, structure and usability.
3. Sharp Shooting: The analogy of the sharp shooter is another good one. This one is simple and makes the point clearly and concisely. The world's best sharp shooter is powerless without a great firearm, and a the best firearm on the planet cannot shoot by itself. The same goes for SEO - a perfectly coded website cannot rank itself and a the world's best consulting firm can't do anything without clients and websites to rank.
4. Landscapers: Landscaping may be one of the best web design analogies in terms of the amount of time and effort it takes to design, install and maintain a landscaping plan. After installation, a residential landscape needs periodic watering, pruning, pest control, mulching and fertilization. The regular maintenance aspect of landscaping parallels the ongoing effort that a website needs in order to grow into high natural search engine positions. The process takes time and consultants with digital green thumbs are usually able to provide their clients with much higher search engine visibility that the could have achieved on their own.
5. Fishing: Second to the race car driving analogy, Fishing is one of our favorites on so many levels. The best angle to use for this analogy relates to net fishing. Think of recreational fishers in an area using chum and other luring techniques to draw fish into a body of water. Fishermen use specialized lures, bait and equipment to catch fish one-by-one. This is akin to traditional marketing where companies use mass marketing to target a relatively small group of potential buyers. In SEO, we call this: offline demand creation. As fishermen use all their fancy methods to attract fish, think of a commercial fishing vessel that comes by and scoops up all the fish. This is EXACTLY what SEO does. Consumers see the demand creation by companies on TV, print and radio...then then run to the Internet to research when they are actually ready to make a purchase decision. SEO, when done effectively, enables your company to steal this market share created by your competitors.
Next time you get stuck trying to explain the relationship between online marketing and web development, try using one of these analogies.
About the Author:
About the author: Kansas City Web Design is an Internet marketing and web development company based in Overland Park, KS. For more information on the author, visit: Website-Design Kansas City
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