Why Your SEO Campaigns Fail: Tactics vs Strategy
This post was made Feb 06, 2009 by Carlos del Rio
credit: kainet
Over the last few months I have had a theme in my posts. Something that I have talked around– but not said directly. Successful search marketing campaigns are not built on tactics; they are built on strategy.
In Advanced SEO Tips & Techniques I made a tongue-in-cheek review of advanced SEO definitions and presented the case that any advice that is tactical doesn’t qualify as advanced. Many people struggle or get only temporary success because they have no strategy, only a few tactics (tricks) that they are throwing at their site.
Tactics
Copywriting, image use, external links, internal linking, social media participation, affiliates sites, etc
Strategy
The combination of tactics that you employ to accomplish your goal.
Putting your strategy together
Step 1) Establish your goal.
Your web analytics, revenue model, and value proposition all serve as the foundation for your strategy. Identifying the part of your marketing that is struggling helps you set your priorities and definition of success. Use this data to inform your keyword research.
Step 2) Assess your resources.
Do you have an advertising budget? Do you have a writer, a programmer, or a social butterfly?
Step 3) Choose your tactics.
Start with your strengths. It is fine to jump in with both feet, but start where you can make some headway.
Step 4) Identify your threats.
You will have to change course midstream. The search engines change, your competitors change, and the searchers change. Be prepared with what you will do down the road. It is important to keep adding to marketing, even if it is just revisiting your early steps.
Why is strategy important?
Search marketing in still a new competition. The tools, tactics, and landscape are changing quickly. Every year we get a new area to compete over on the web: Google, Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, ad nauseum. The factors that contribute to success are becoming so diverse that you need to be more concerned with the larger implications of your work. When one channel gets noisy you need to be prepared to shift focus into something different (even if it isn’t new).
Good marketing has more to do with game theory than with knowing about the new start-ups.
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So many businesses get this wrong at the fundamental level.
I had a client ask me a few weeks back what metrics they should be looking at to determine if a new blog they’re launching is successful.
They seemed surprised when I asked them who the blog was going to be written for.
“It’s for us to promote our services.”
Not quite.
There’s no one key metric – your metrics must be tied to specific goals. And having relevant goals means having a marketing strategy that considers who it is your efforts focus on and how.
Tactics, and where/how you employ them, must arrive from that strategy.
Great post.