SEO Basics: When to Call for Help

I've had quite a few emails this week from companies that are looking to get into the search engine marketing (specifically search optimization) game and most of them are making a common, but sometimes major mistake. They're waiting until their sites are built or their redesigns are complete before seeking out search engine optimization advice. Not good. While this is old news to most that have been around the industry for awhile, it's a business changing piece of advice for the companies that view search marketing as "just another form of marketing."

See, most companies rightly view marketing as the thing that you start worrying about AFTER you have your store open, your products ready to sell, your site built, etc... After all, you can't sell what's not yet there, so why worry about it?

The problem is that with some new forms of marketing, (organic search and viral spring to mind) the campaign must be considered and integrated into the site as it's being built. Otherwise, you can make a lot more work for yourself.

You see, with search engine optimization, much of your ability to market depends on the very foundation of your web site. If your designer has convinced you to build a fancy site that operates completely on Flash, you'll find yourself with limited options for organic optimization. If there's no room for content in your design, you'll need to pay for another design or find a way to squeeze text in.

Site architecture that isn't built with search engines in mind will have to be re-coded. Site copy that doesn't take keyword research into consideration will have to be rewritten. In other words, you can find yourself right back at square one...but with lots of time and money already spent.

That's not a happy discovery for small business owners on a tight budget.

It works much the same way in the viral realm.

For example, I had a call earlier this year from a very large clothing retailer. They had built a video advertisement that they wanted to go viral. They were calling me to ask about consulting services for planning a viral launch. Unfortunately, as I passed on the project, I had to explain to them that you can't just "make" something go viral. It's not as simple as buying up ad space on media outlets. In other worse, unless something is just going to go viral on its own, you really need to do research and plan your viral campaign before you ever even make your creative. They decided to promote via traditional media and with a new understanding of viral, to start making plans a little earlier the next time around.

On the rare occasions when I work with a company to create a viral campaign, we start by deciding what type of audience they wish to reach and what the ultimate conversion goals are. From there, we do research into that target audience. Where do they spend time online? What does their conversation look like? What types of things have they passed around amongst themselves in the past? Is there anything they're asking for that the client could provide? Once we've started to answer these questions we can not only build a plan for releasing/launching the campaign, but we can also answer that essential question of what the campaign should even be.

This is why it's absolutely essential that you consider your marketing plans BEFORE you begin a redesign or a new campaign launch. Take a deep breath and stop putting all your focus in to creating something that looks great, but might never find its way in front of its intended audience.