Know your audience. Know your message. Know why your message is relevant, or why audience should care about it. These three mantras are simple and straightforward, yet a large number of website owners and San Jose SEO professionals seem to want to dive into implementing and search engine optimization plan without adequately considering them first. Any audience that does so, is ultimately doomed to end in expensive failure.
Unfortunately, there are no software tools that can tell you what you need to know about your audience, your message and their relationship. It is the answer to these questions that should guide the entire website development effort, and not just the search engine optimization.
The PR, advertising, business development and marketing departments for any business or website need to set the overall objectives for the website. Successful San Jose SEO projects are invariably team efforts. Ideally this team should be multidisciplinary, cross-functional, and involve the main stakeholders from the departments already mentioned. At the very least, there should be a single team lead or manage, a technical lead, and someone covering the creative side.
In many small organizations, it will be one person responsible for all of these areas. This is not necessarily a problem though, as long as the person responsible is able to look at the problem from these different and often conflicting perspectives. Along with coordinating all the efforts, the team leader should set the overall direction of the San Jose SEO project. Some questions a team leader should be asking include the following:
* who is the core audience targeted by the website?
* what can the marketing department tell us about them?
* how have we found this audience in the past?
* what metrics shall be used to track them?
The answers to these questions should (and will) have an impact on the final technical choices and implementation.
The people from advertising should have a well thought out and clear message already prepared for the website. Key phrases and marketing slogans should already have been decided before the San Jose SEO project begins. While feedback on the current competitive environment will influence their evolution, there should already be strong buy in for the advertising plans. Debating whether to optimize for “best widgets ever” or “the only widget you will ever need” six weeks into a project is unlikely going to lead to a successful San Jose SEO implementation.
The main role of advertising in any organization is to compel people to take a specific action. That action too, needs to be clearly defined. If you are running an San Jose SEO project to get more people to buy your widgets, everyone needs to be on board that this is the primary goal. If half your team want to increase sales, while the other want your clients to download your “widget screensaver”, the project will not achieve either goal particularly well.
Ultimately though, the technical team is responsible for actually delivering the project. While the overall direction and goals might be driven by PR, advertising and marketing, it will be up to the technical team to implement these in an effective San Jose SEO plan. You cannot expect each department to work independently and then hand over their work to this implementation team though. The entire SEO effort will be an iterative process.
As implementation of the plan progresses, for example, marketing should continue to feedback on whether the target audience is being reached and whether they are getting the message. Advertising should be able to point out whether this audience is taking the desired action. PR will be able to gauge the media perceptions and responses to the plan. Continual feedback and evaluation is going to be essential to prevent you spending a lot of time, money and effort optimizing in a way that is not working, or worse, optimizing for goals that do not contribute to the overall strategic direction of the business.
In conclusion, it cannot be stressed enough that a successful San Jose SEO project can only be delivered through teamwork. Communication between the various stakeholders and team members will therefore be vital. Even for San Jose SEO projects that have a team of one, that individual will need to understand the value and importance of thinking through the plan from the many different perspectives covered.