The Virtual Entrepreneur

Have We Put The Cart Before The Horse?

 

Online marketing efforts are like a store front or a trade show booth. They are effective only when they receive traffic. That brings us to the question of the day; for the small business working to build a recognized brand, how is traffic most effectively and cost efficiently generated?

 

 I’m not a web developer or an SEO expert but I am fairly tech savvy. Nevertheless, from time to time I find it useful to step away from the bells and whistles and establish a real world view for what will ultimately be a technology intensive project.

 

In the real world, the goal of every marketing project should be to engage the client. Engagement is the mechanism by which we establish relationships. Relationships build trust and through them, we come to understand what our clients need and how to serve them best.

 

Once this is accomplished, we can offer effective solutions and if we have built enough trust, conclude a sale. If we do this well enough and often enough we can bring about what I like to call the “Clairol Effect”; your client tells 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and so on and so on. This word of mouth form of marketing takes time and persistence. Most importantly, it takes adherence to the principle that your primary job is to satisfy your clients’ needs. It is without doubt, the single most effective method that I know of to grow your business.

 

In the world of virtual marketing however, the client centric approach seems to have lost its appeal. Articles like the one published by Entrepreneur Magazine in February, state emphatically that Search Engine Optimization is the first and best way to go. I’m not so sure.

 

SEO is the art of tweaking web sites from within their underlying code, from the outside through high profile back links and a hundred other things. The assumption is that search engine rankings are critical from a marketing perspective because most people use online search sites as a first stop when they are trying to find something on the web. Without SEO in place, we are left with the impression that we can never find an audience.

 

Articles like the one in Entrepreneur suggest to the small business operator that for internet marketing purposes, our attention needs to be focused not on our clients but on the search engines. We are told that we need to design our sites so they are “search engine friendly”. We need to establish relationships with other sites so that search engines can find us. What happened to being client friendly? Did the rules of marketing change so dramatically for the internet that only Google counts?

 

For the business faced with limited resources, I would like to suggest that Social Network Marketing is a better option. SNM falls back on the real world marketing principles I mentioned above. It takes advantage of the explosion in web based social networks and make it easier to come into contact with communities which share an interest in what we can bring to them. It gives us the opportunity to make contact with prospects on an individual basis and establish relationships. Using SNM we build trust by presenting our expertise through participation in the communities that make up our market.

 

From a technical perspective, the problem with SEO is that it’s an art but it presents itself as a science. The reason for this is that the Search business is intensely competitive. As a result the logic used by SEs to establish site rank is a closely held and constantly evolving secret. SEO professionals have to make their best guess as to what really works.

 

What bothers me about all of this is that SEO services are very rarely sold on this basis. After all, not many of us would buy a service if the provider told us that in offering their expertise, they could only provide us their best guess as to the outcome of our investment.

 

In addition, because SE algorithms (the logic used to rank pages) are constantly evolving, the SEO industry has generated a vast array of rules which they insist must be applied when designing and building sites.

 

In a recent Q&A on LinkedIn, a frustrated web developer illustrated just how difficult it can be to build attractive and content rich sites while living within the “known” SEO rules of engagement. The discussion generated 14 comments, an unusually high number and expressed points of view ranging from “if you don’t SEO the site you won’t have traffic” to “This is where I’ve had to stand firm in the clash between beauty and Search Engine Friendly”. Keep in mind; this is a discussion taking place in a back channel between professionals in the fields of web design and SEO! If they can’t figure it out, how can business people in other fields make intelligent decisions about using the technology? The worst consequence of all of this in my mind is that it opens the door for convincing hacks to sell their charms and rattles to the rest of us.

 

How this frenzy of attention to SEO impacts entrepreneurs is perhaps illustrated by a personal story.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I heard from a buddy who proudly announced that he hired an SEO “expert” a few months back and for only $500 a month he was promised page 1 on a Google search for a few selected keywords. He very proudly told me that after only 4 months, his web site had moved all the way up to the 3^rd Google page.

 

In another LinkedIn discussion on this subject, a web marketing professional indicated the following “click through” rates for the top 5 positions on Google page one search results: P1=42% P2=12% P3=8.5% P4=6% P5=5%. If these numbers are correct, my buddy’s rise to page 3 had no impact at all to visitor traffic on his site.

 

The person in question is a very successful entrepreneur who is truly an expert in his field but he knows very little about internet marketing. His company’s web site has been refreshed recently but is not content heavy and is basically a static Web 1.0 catalog. His SEO “expert” has never even looked at the site! He never suggested adding dynamic content to engage his audience or adding a web form to capture leads. I don’t blame my buddy. He has his hands full in his own business. I do blame this SEO “expert” and the SEO industry in general for over-emphasizing manipulative over organic (read earned) rankings.

 

There’s a common problem here that seems to be impacting both the frustrated web designer and my buddy and it’s a direct result of the hyperactivity surrounding SEO. The problem is that we have stopped thinking about the client and we are instead focusing our attention on the search engines themselves.

 

The social media alternative comes in the form of social networks, blogs and web sites designed specifically to be engaging, informative and interactive for our target markets. SNM offers the small business operator a way to take their expertise to market with a limited budget, requiring only content rich and interactive web presence and a time investment. It is effective without the intervention of experts who may or may not have any real expertise and it can be managed and readily understood by the average business person.

 

Aside from providing us with direct channels to our target markets, social media is at least as good for generating referrals to our web sites as search engines. The resulting traffic has a better sense of what they might find when they get to our sites and they are ultimately better qualified leads who are more likely to be converted to clients.

 

I first ran into this point of view while researching my post about selecting domain names. In a blog post by Thomas Baekdal called Designing Future Web Sites Thomas offered statistics from his own blog to show how social networks had far and away become his most important source of referrals. He went on to say that he expects this trend to continue and to grow because ultimately people will tend to trust other people for reliable references more than they will trust search engines.

 

At the time I was doing this research, I was just starting my blog. Thomas’ contention made sense to me but I had no direct evidence. Since then I have been actively participating in social networks to better under the issues faced by my markets and my blog performance certainly supports his claim. My audience has grown far more than I would have expected and the rate of growth has surprised me. I have done nothing in the way of SEO. Of the hundreds of referrals I’ve received only 1 or 2 have come from search engines. In fact I can’t even find my blog on Google but I don’t really care as long as my audience finds value in what I have to say. The growth has been organic and to me that has far more value than any rush of unqualified visitors I might have generated by putting money into SEO.

 

 

 

At the end of the day, social network marketing is a form of virtual marketing which will fit into the limited budgets available to the entrepreneur. It can be understood and effectively directed by business operators who are not internet experts. It generates visitors who are interested and engaged in what is being offered and it is at least as effective but far more honest than the SEO alternative.

 

If you’re working with an unlimited marketing budget, there’s nothing wrong with finding a reputable SEO professional and making your site more search engine friendly as long as you don’t forget who your client is. But if your business is like most small businesses and you’re working on a shoestring, fall back on what you know works best in the real world and apply it to your virtual presence through social network marketing. That way you’ll be sure you’re not putting the cart before the horse.