SEO Technology Environment
Trying to run an SEO campaign without the right SEO technology environment is like trying to run a call center without phones. Sure, you are thinking that SEO technology is some sort of black hat automation thing. Sure, that’s out there. But the professionals don’t bother with that. No, what I’m talking about is a real SEO technology environment, or platform, that supports the work activities associated with a white hat SEO campaign for a Fortune 100 firm.
Let’s take a step back. If you don’t know the basic recipe for good SEO there are several ways to learn. First, read the Google guidelines for webmasters as well as their published guidelines for how to select an SEO consulting firm. This will give you good ideas. Then spend an hour in any of the major SEO forums online. They all pretty much say the same things. When you are done, you will have learned:
1) Have a high-quality site with good content that people want. 2) Construct your site using SEO web design approaches. 3) Get back links from relevant sites.
So, armed with this information, your average dude will start a blog on their site, adjust their title tags and submit a few well-written articles (like this one) to major article syndication outlets. Then they will wait. Each morning they will check Google to see how their site is doing. Unless there are under 100,000 pages indexed on their term (which is rare for anything of value), nothing will happen. So they will repeat the process for another two weeks. And still nothing. Maybe if they are lucky, they will find themselves way down in position 457 in Google. That’s like page 45. This is not going well.
Don’t feel bad. This is the experience of thousands of people each year. They come at this with no tools, experience. They massively under estimate how hard it will be to rank. Once they understand the magnitude, then they realize they need to be organized. This is a where professional SEO technology environment can be quite helpful. In a competitive keyword phrase space, you are likely to complete over 1,000 tasks over 12 months to gain any traction on that term. Yes, a year. Yes. Over 1,000 individual tasks. How are you going to keep all this organized?
Now that you know that search engine optimization is a marathon and not a sprint, you are starting to understand my opening statement. Running SEO without the appropriate SEO technology environment is like running a call center without phones. It just doesn’t work. And this industry is so new, that there really are not that many platforms out there. Additionally, it is in Google’s interest to keep you from finding and using these platforms. Every sale through SEO is a sale they could have had through PPC. Not good for their revenue.
