Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

BECOMING TOO FOCUSED ON SEO

As already noted, this book is not about how to tactically implement SEO. This book is about how to think strategically about search and how your business fits into a search-based culture.

There is, however, one point of tactical SEO that is important to convey to your organization. If you read search blogs, attend search conferences, and otherwise follow the search industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the particulars of the search engine algorithms. How many times should a particular word be repeated? How many links should any given page have? How many words should be on any given page? Chasing the answers to these questions can have vast opportunity cost and little gain. The search engine algorithms are in a constant state of flux. Search engine engineers tweak settings every day to see how they can make results a little more relevant. If you spend your time optimizing your site for these algorithmic particulars, you’ll never have time to do anything else.

A much better strategy is to focus on what the search engines are trying to achieve with all of those algorithm tweaks—showing the most relevant results for a given query. Ensure your technical team gets the foundational infrastructure elements right (as described in Chapter 7) and ensure your marketing and product teams build the right features and content. Not only will this result in you ranking well, but it will help you achieve what you’re really after—which is not rankings, but customers. ...