Thomas Schmitz
Organic Search is a Traffic Channel, Not a Marketing Channel
One of my Principles of SEO is that organic search is a traffic channel, not a marketing channel. Whenever I say this, some industry veterans look incredulous or challenge my statement. Of course SEO is a marketing channel; how can an entire industry evolve around SEO without it being a marketing channel?
I stand my ground.
Search engine optimization is a set of best practices to apply to your marketing channels, online and, to some extent, offline. What is a marketing channel? It?s a conduit of communication between a business and its stakeholders. Marketing channels deliver messages. They create awareness, engagement, demand, and sales. They influence perception and reputation. You don?t put messages in SEO; you apply SEO to your messages. SEO creates traffic from organic search by making online marketing channels more visible.
As a whole, the Internet is a macro marketing channel, one we tend to perceive through its component micro marketing channels:
- Company website
- Social media accounts
- Placed content
- Email
- Advertisements
SEO guides and informs Internet marketing. Let?s break it down.
Company Website
Keywords and Content
SEO guides marketing teams as to what content should be on websites by providing knowledge around search queries and people?s search habits. It begins with the question, ?What keywords do people search for to find my products and services?? It extends to increasing awareness, engagement, and desire by applying keywords to support, educational, and promotional content. SEO also informs marketing teams about topics people search for, which leads to articles, white papers, webinars, and other niche marketing channels or forms of presentation. This, in turn, influences or guides much of a business?s social media content. Finally, SEO guides copywriters how to write text that is both appealing to people and will emphasize target keywords.
Architecture
Applying SEO principals for internal linking to site architecture and visibility helps search engines discover and index content, then rank documents for relevant queries.
Coding
Coding is a big part of SEO, and the reason many companies categorize SEO into IT, not marketing. From simple codes for bold, italics, h1, and alt attributes to machine readable markup like Schema.org, optimized markup helps search engines parse the content it discovers then present it to people. Tools like XML sitemaps assist discovery and indexing. Canonical tags group ranking signals for duplicate content. These all make the content you have more visible, but none performs content delivery to markets.
Trust
SEO extends to server optimization (speed), domain age, contact information, author tags, plus other signals search engines use to determine trust and quality.
Ultimately, the website is the marketing channel, one people can arrive at directly, from referral links, or paid or non-paid search.
Social Media
Social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are outlets where businesses can present messages and develop audiences that grow awareness and generate leads. If you use a website hub and social media spokes strategy, then the content on your website determines, to a large extent, your social media messages. You can enhance your website?s optimization by sending authority via links from social media messages to your website. You can optimize your social media accounts to appear in organic search by applying SEO methods like keyword use and link building to social media messages. Even the act of presenting your Google+ address on a slide during a conference presentation and inviting audience members to follow you is a form of search engine optimization. By growing an audience for your social media accounts, you increase their ability to influence search engines.
Placed Content
Placed content includes online press releases, guest blogging articles, and most everything on other websites that discusses and links to your own website or social media accounts. It aids discovery, authority building, and relevancy. Placed content works best when it raises awareness and generates referral traffic, which means it should fall within your company?s messaging. While you may be looking to place the perfect keyword optimized link for SEO, while SEO may guide your placed content selections, it must also fit your business communications.
Email
Surprisingly, many people do not associate email and SEO. You should. Email strengthens your relationship with your audience, people with whom you?re already engaged. It?s inside the marketing funnel: engagement, desire, and sales. So it?s easy to think of Email as marketing messages and not SEO messages. You should also use Email to communicate with your network or content creators, people who can link from their sites to your website or social media messages. However, it?s not enough to ask these people for links because, if you want them to write about your business and link to it, you must provide content that will appeal to those content creators? audiences. Once again, you can optimize the message, but your business and conversations determine what those messages contain.
Advertising
Using advertising for SEO is a stretch. Obviously advertising itself should offer no SEO impact. It?s a pure marketing channel. What advertising can accomplish is build awareness that content creators may pick-up on, though this is an indirect benefit.
Still not sure? Then think about web analytics. For SEO you want to measure things like organic search engine referrals, but what happens after a visitor arrives on your website? Do they bounce? Do they click through to other pages? Do they generate a conversion? All these and other important metrics are more about content, usability and design, and the appropriateness of your offers than anything else. Whether a visitor arrives from non-paid search, paid search or advertising, a referral link, or directly by typing in your web address, while you can segment them by traffic source, it?s your messaging and presentation that determines visitor behavior.
Ultimately, a marketing channel is a somewhere you can place your message. While you can increase the likelihood that your listing will appear in non-paid search, even influence its appearance, you don?t control it. It?s a competition for an earned placement that will bring traffic to the real marketing channel, your website or your social media content.
You can see my other SEO Principles at http://schmitzmarketing.com/search-engine-optimization-principles.
Source: http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/10/08/organic-search-is-a-traffic-channel-not-a-marketing-channel/
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