Anne Ahola Ward - The SEO Battlefield: Winning Strategies for Search Marketing Programs

• 2016-11-17: First Early Release

The practice of search engine optimization is inherently competitive yet fair because nobody maintains top positions forever. Change is an uninterrupted force. Search is akin to a battlefield, because SEO warriors must continually empire-build or risk losing it all. Companies rarely maintain search prominence without sagacious exertion and commitment. Just like life and love, search is a battlefield.

Wake early if you want another mans life or land. No lamb for the lazy wolf. No battles fought in bed.

-The Havamal , Old Norse

Coveted search rankings do not happen by accident. If you want to rank in the top entries consistently, you must work tirelessly. Exalted kings of search are seldom if not rare. If youre some kind of search legend, like Prince or Bowie or (gasp) Kim Kardashian, or maybe you get caught in a (hopefully) positive news cycle, you could get lucky. But do you really want to depend on luck?

How do we define search? Searching signals the intention to explore information via search engine. Search can do so much for us; make fortunes, help convict murderers, connect lost relatives and manipulate elections (vis a vis season 3, House of Cards). To understand and then anticipate what people will explore online seems like magic for some people. Theres no magic in SEO, it only seems that way from the outside because the actions taken are completely unpredictable. Search is the gateway to the bounteous information held within the web, the Giant Global Graph and thus the internet as a whole.

Building a successful SEO program means being realistic about your resources, automating what you can when you can and experimenting all of the time. Try to learn from those experiments. The thing about having gumption is that its presence does not guarantee successful outcomes. SEO programs are doomed to fail when they dont quickly recognize whats not working or get bogged down in minutia, but hey thats more billable hours, right? (kidding!)

Search optimization continues to happen everywhere- whether or not you take notice. When youre searching for something as simple as a persons name its fairly rare to not see various social media listings dominating page one. Sites like Facebook, Yelp or LinkedIn easily own the top search listing on a search engine result page (SERP) for a persons name or business. If a person is not internet-active then arbitrageurs or sites like Spokeo and White Pages will successfully rank for their name. Common names often have expanded paid and organic results: listings pages on LinkedIn or paid ads for background checks, alumni or finding public records.

You can lose significant ground to a competitor for a highly lucrative search term if you do not invest in SEO, or at least stay aware of it. Its imperative to remain aware of how you appear online in todays business world and the vast majority of society. One scenario that can happen if you do not pay attention to your sites SEO is that an arbitrager will creep into the space. Arbitrageurs work to rank for what you want to rank for and then sell it back to you (or anyone else who will pay). Arbitrageurs are like ghost ships who play an expensive game of monopoly. Ive seen very expensive online usurping happen to companies who lag behind and its an unfortunate price to pay for a slow market reaction time.

In order to grow a websites presence, constant effort must be expended. Elements of both offense and defense strategies should co-exist symbiotically within all search programs. SEOs and Growth Hackers alike make moves with poles apart tactics and maneuvers. Everyone can make a place on the virtual chess search board. What you choose to do about it is up to you. I say own it.

Organizations with a lack of SEO mindfulness can easily become dependent on costly paid search traffic for revenue. Paid traffic takes many forms: affiliate marketing, retargeting, geo-local-mobile, etc. Paid is not a contradistinctive force to organic search. There are many fiscal benefits to paid search when it is done right, especially retargeting or social. Mixing organic and paid search can yield interesting fruits. There are different areas of battle, prepare for all paths: instead of one if by land, two by sea, the true professional covers both. Diversification of promotional assets allows for the deepest penetration. Its been shown countless times that it helps users to gain trust when they see a company name mentioned twice or more in a search result.

There are more search engines and methods for a site to be found than a simple Bing search. Worrying about only one engine and method of search feels like the easiest thing to do, but thats not necessarily the best. Many SEO programs fail because they forget to diversify. For example, Ive been watching this new socially focused eco-good browser Ecosia take off slowly but surely since 2013. Ecosia is fun to use and returns generally useful results. I love that my search queries are planting trees! Im at 1758 and counting.

In 2016 Ecosias traffic feels insignificant statistically if Google is the only foil for success. A portion of the proceeds on Ecosias ads go towards planting trees in Africa and beyond, they surpassed 4 million trees in early 2016. The ads platform runs on Yahoo! and Bings network. It all started when CEO and founder of Ecosia, Christian Kroll read a book about the importance of rainforests and decided he had no choice but to take action. He started Ecosias predecessor Forestle, which was managed in partnership with Google. The project took off and started to take flight quickly. Then it shut down suddenly.