Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy Is Your Business Strategy

Chapter 6. Implementing an Effective Search Strategy

In previous chapters, we learned how to use the intersection of search data and business needs to identify effective Web site content strategies, as well as a little about how search engines work. How can we bring this information together into our organizations so that our content strategies are effective for search?

At a high level, in order to effectively use organic search as an acquisition channel, companies should ensure their Web sites can:

• Be discovered by search engines so their pages can be added to the list the crawler uses to traverse the Web.

• Be accessible to the crawler (build the site architecture so that it doesn't introduce obstacles).

• Have extractable information (ensure content isn't inaccessible).

• Be relevant and useful to searchers.

Sounds easy, right? The good news is that the path to success is fairly straightforward. But as you might imagine, the devil is in the details. The practice of ensuring that sites implement all of these things in a way that searchers can find them is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

However, as we've seen, for a business to be effective online long term, it has to think of search as a key part of all aspects of its organization, and not as a separate activity. And the term "search engine optimization" is a bit of a misnomer because it implies that you're optimizing your site for search engines when in reality you're optimizing your site for your audience (who often are searchers) ...