Lindsay Ball Marketing   Building relationships through effective communication.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tricky thing to say the least. Obviously you want your website/blog/Facebook page/fill-in-the-blank to be found by as many people who are searching for your content as possible. (I say “searching for your content” because just having as many visitors as possible isn’t important if those people weren’t looking for what you’re offering.) And there are many very legitimate and helpful ways of making your content as findable as possible. Putting the main keywords from your content in meta-tags is one way. Linking to your own webpages from your other webpages is another. For the truly technical the list can go on and on. However, it’s important not to lose site of the point of doing all this: you want to connect with the people who are interested in what you have to offer and–let’s be honest here–sell them your wares. And SEO isn’t necessarily a panacea for accomplishing this.

I was reminded of this recently when discussing microsites with a respected colleague trained in SEO. We had the common goal of making this microsite as effective as possible for the office we were building it for. This office is in a location that neither of us knew much about so we were reliant on the associates in the office to provide the details about their customers and what those customers needed. My colleague was very concerned about the title we were giving the site because her SEO statistics were showing that those weren’t the right keywords to use. According to her data the people in that area were using other terms when searching for an office in that area.

After discussing the issue with that office I came to realize something. The main use of their microsite wasn’t to attract new customers–it was to service their existing ones. This is a somewhat rural area and the majority of their web visitors find them because our associates told them about the site and showed them how to conduct business on the site. New customers finding them from an Internet search were rare. That’s not to say we should have ignored the data and we didn’t. But if we had relied solely on the data we would have turned off a number of their existing customers because the focus of the site and the verbiage used would have shifted and the office would have appeared to be ignoring regional concerns in favor of corporate ones.

All of this just provides a cautionary tale. When you’re neck-deep in data, trying to make sense of it all and use the information to create strategies, don’t forget to pick your head up and talk to the people you are trying to service. You always want a complete picture of what you are trying to accomplish and that should include a human side. There is most definitely a proper way to use SEO to reach your target audience, but it is only one more tool in your belt when it comes to building relationships and accomplishing your ultimate goal: making the sale.

Image: Jeffrey Beall via Flickr