The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER THREE

SEO Planning: Customizing Your Strategy

SEO, once a highly specialized and often marginalized task relegated to the back rooms of website development teams, is now a mainstream digital marketing activity. Its dramatic rise can be attributed to various emerging trends, including:

• Search engines now drive a large volume of highly targeted traffic from people intent on accomplishing research-based, purchase-oriented, and content consumption goals. Businesses can earn significant revenues by leveraging the quality and relevance of this traffic for direct sales, customer acquisition, and content and branding/awareness campaigns.

• Visibility in search engines creates an implied endorsement effect, whereby searchers associate quality, relevance, and trustworthiness with sites that rank highly for their queries.

• Dramatic growth in the interaction between offline and online marketing necessitates investment by organizations of all kinds in a successful search strategy. Consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for tasks ranging from researching purchases in verticals such as real estate, automobiles, and technology to finding local resources for health and wellness services. At this stage, businesses simply cannot afford to ignore their customers’ needs as expressed through searches conducted on the major search engines.

Search engine optimization is a technical marketing function that relies upon both content creation and technological development, and success ...