Diane Kuehn, President, VisionPoint Marketing
Diane Kuehn founded VisionPoint Marketing after holding numerous executive sales and market- ing positions with, among others, Cox Communications, SourceLink, High Speed Net Solutions, and ADVO―the country’s largest direct marketing firm. Today, she’s what the company calls the “lead brainiac.”
VisionPoint Marketing is a marketing solutions agency providing integrated programs-interactive and/or traditional tactics- for mid-sized organizations in a variety of industries including higher education, health care, biotech/life sciences, pharmaceutical, high tech, and business services.
Jerri: What’s the big deal about SEO? Why is it suddenly the “must have” strategy for web sites?
Kuehn: I really think this is not new. I think that it’s just a matter of people figuring out the Web. There are a lot of organizations that are just beginning to realize there has been a paradigm shift in the last 12-18 months.
I’m not sure the “must have” is a recent focus. I think that a lot of organizations have spent the last five to ten years figuring out what to do with their web site first. Now, as most are considering how the Web has changed, especially over the past few years, and they need to do a re-design, organiza- tions realize that if they want to optimize their sites for the search engines, they need to start that process when they are re-designing and building their site.
This is the time to start the SEO process. I think SEO hasn’t been something that they’ve focused on in the past as much, because they haven’t focused on web-site redesign. A lot of things are hap- pening now that are causing people to refocus at this time.
The cost of search is zero. Since search is free we are no longer basing our decisions on Yellow Pages. And search is even faster than word of mouth. Google search result pages are better than having per- fect retail space on Main Street or a perfect billboard, so by optimizing your web site you can really do so much more and you can get better results and it doesn’t cost as much as it has in the past. Before, you had to spend a lot of money on all those other marketing outlets. Now if you can be good at organic SEO, you have a jump start on getting people to your site.
Rather than marketing-intrusive marketing-at your customer, prime customers (those who are ready to buy and are specific to your niche), you need to make sure they find you. Using search marketing you can meet their needs rather than hitting them with intrusive marketing. And if you are ranking well organically, there is an assumed authority that you are a leader in a specific field.
The last research I saw is that conversion from organic click vs. paid click is three to one overpaid. And B2B [business-to-business] clients do know the difference. They’re savvy enough in general to know the difference.
Jerri: What are some of the most frequently ignored strategies for implementing SEO? How does ignoring those strategies hurt organizations and how could improving them help?
Kuehn: A company or organization really needs to understand that ranking well in search engines is not about paying an agency to just do it. They have to build content. It truly is about building valuable content on your web site or out in the community
It comes down to content versus search. People are finding things faster; they search for stuff and find it, and then when they get there, they’re interacting more. So sites built for the search engine- search engines are getting smarter so they recognize when a site isn’t built for people. Then, when the people come to the site and see it’s built for a search engine, they won’t stay. Focusing on building for search engines doesn’t work. You have to provide the audience with the content that they want.
Some companies don’t understand that they need to build content. I just saw some research yester- day that talks about how time spent on content as an activity on the Web has increased by 37 per- cent, while search as an activity has decreased by 35 percent over the past four years. Focusing on simply getting top results in rankings on the engines isn’t going to get you new customers. You need to build content that helps you get top rankings on the engines and positions your organization as a thought leader or provides your audience with the content that they want.
Blogs, tutorials, high-quality tips and tricks… companies need to have the mindset that giving away info that is truly valuable is the best strategy. When you have good content that’s linkworthy, then people are going to link to it.
Another thing that companies need to think about is the navigation: how pages on your site interlink, and how the site works when you are dropped in the middle of it. If you’re doing it right, people are coming into your site from all different places. Your design needs to be such that they know where they are in the site and they know how to get around. I have found a lot of organizations think that the old standbys, such as pages that are about us, or contact pages and the like, are sufficient. They’re not thinking about “when I land in the middle of the site, I still want to know how to get around.” It’s just assumed that I’m coming in from the home page and that’s not always what happens.
Jerri: Are there other aspects of SEO that organizations could improve upon?
Kuehn: The biggest strategy that we find is undervalued or ignored, that not only helps SEO but also makes a site more user-friendly, is its information architecture. Planning out your site’s navigation in such a way as to allow someone who drops right into the middle of the site from a search engine results page to still know where they are, how to find additional information, and motivates them to take the call to action is extremely important. Once again, it’s not about getting top rankings on the search engine results page; it’s about getting the right people to your site and then engaging them.
Jerri: In what areas is SEO being handled well?
Kuehn: People are starting work in modern coding standards and that is good for SEO. We build all of our sites in XHTML. That means that it can work extremely well for the user in all of the different browsers, but also it’s read the best by spider, and mobile devices display it just like it’s supposed to be displayed. Now I’m starting to see customers that are starting to recognize that this is an important thing. And other firms that are also starting to code that way.
Jerri: What’s coming for the future of SEO and how can organizations begin to prepare for those coming changes now?
Kuehn: I think that what’s happening with the Web… if you think of the evolution of search engines and the search engine algorithms, they have to stay a couple of steps ahead of the search engine spammers. So we’re starting to see search results or weighting a site more by using a human editor. For example, there is some indication that Google may begin weighing Digg results into the authority given to a web site.
We are also going to see more and more content that is built specifically for SEO being removed from search engine result pages. Social search- Mahalo is a good example-wikis of search results and other methods of human-filtered content are becoming popular. And it will work especially well if you can develop a way to use other search tools like Google and Yahoo! and filter out all the use- less information.
Google is best suited to figure this out. So while there are sites out there like Digg and you’re using them to vote as to whether a site is good or not, I think that Google could start to figure out how to weigh human input into their algorithm, then that’s essentially what’s going to happen. The future is going to be more about “let’s not focus so much on the search engine, let’s focus on what’s valuable content.”
It’s like the saying, “If you build it they will come.” I think humans as opposed to a machine might think about your site and how valuable your site is and that’s going to be much more important than anything else that you can do. So if you can get people to drink the Kool-Aid on that-if you build it, they will come.
Jerri: How do you see vertical SEO going?
Kuehn: I think we’re a little bit far off from that right now… that being where you want to spend a lot of time. Of course it depends on how niche your business focus is. Let’s use real estate as an example. If you’re in real estate, you’re going to want to focus on major search engines because that’s where your audience is. Your audience isn’t going to be something niche.
It depends. There are sites like Knowledge Storm where you see a lot of tech things and you can pay to be on there. That can be very effective from the marketing perspective of participating on that, but right now the money and focus should be on where people are going, and right now they’re still on the major search engines. I think it’s a ways off before people are going to their own niche area.
If Google can figure out how to (in specific vertical or niche areas) deliver me good results, why would you try something else? Why would you split your searches up into different areas?
