SEO… Something for Every-One

I watched a movie the other day about how to put a different spin on ideas that you find common but that the every-day man might not.

It wasn’t a documentary by any manner of means, it was a light-hearted comedy called ‘Confessions of a Shop-a-holic’, and I actually learned something. No, not about my shoe shopping … urm… never mind, about how it can work if you appeal to different every-day people on a very every-day level.

I reckon I’m an every-day person (with a mild shoe, bag and hat thingey going on…), so I wanted to give it a try with a brief touch on accountants, lawyers, PR folks, customers and shareholders. Let me know how you think I did…

Accountants – who want to make a profit online

‘Something for Every-one’ means great web profits, which means a great income statement and a good-looking balance sheet.

… – who want to make a loss online

Objective: to mess with Something-for-everyone

Hire a poor search optimizer and watch your web income fall. Follow up with a really inept sponsored search person and make a bigger loss pretty damn fast. In fact the more money you give them, the more they’ll lose. Tidy it up and it’s a great way to lose money ‘legitimately’ but you still need to show some kind of business case – though that’s not your fault, the VPF should have that nicely in-hand, and he in-turn can blame the COO and CEO and the Prez – and so on… You’ll likely miss a jail term – maybe.

Lawyers

‘Something for Every-One’ means you can ensure you get your legal speak in the right place, and where people can find your terms and conditions, privacy policies and more on the web.

You even get a step up because if you work with the ‘real SEO’ team and the web devs, you can make sure the bits you don’t want the public to see are still there for the right people, but not for the general public. An intranet is best of course, but there is always more. (I did a measly three years of undergrad law, and those three years left me knowing that from a legal stand point, there is ALWAYS more – it’s pretty much 100% guaranteed.)

General Admin

This is a pearl in obeisance to the ocean of general admin ‘stuff’ that makes up the day of the people who actually make the economy run (hat-tip).

SEOs (the ‘something for everyone’ folks) give you a new, different type of person to hire, a new type of training to employ, a different salary range to decipher and apply, and a different personality in entirety to deal with from an HR perspective and a general admin perspective. Define what you need (not what you want) well ahead of time because I have yet (after some years) to find any SEO that fits any stereotype, pigeonhole or preconceived idea of what an SEO should be, do and become.

Public Relations – Interested in positive PR

Utilize the SEOs (the actual search optimizers and something for everyone folks) for the benefit of your online press releases, include them in your PR drive to enable their creation of new pages around new taglines. Even better, assist them in their drive to write what they fondly call ‘link-bait’, and work with them in the social networks to create a PR/SEO optimized (not redundant, and yet somewhat) approach to dealing with detractors and supporting evangelists in real time.

… – Interested in negative PR

Go head-to-head against everything mentioned above. It will work. Even better, strive to pee-off the social networks as fast as you can. Again, 100% Guaranteed.

Customers

SEO (something for everyone) means they can find what they need when they’re already pre-qualified in terms of intent. The level of intent may vary, but that’s where really good SEOs (the optimizing type) have worked with design and dev to ensure a quick, effective targeted conversion funnel.

Customers find what they want and need, and get to buy it online in a usable, friendly, approachable, non-threatening, secure manner. Something for everyone hits the masses right there!

Shareholders

These guys are sometimes likened to the accountants who ‘don’t want a profit’ – but rarely. Most investors are short term, want a fast profit, don’t want undue risk, and have less than a million dollars.

Question:

How can we make their shareholding work for them short-term to encourage them to stay for a longer term?

Answer:

Where possible, offer them a track record of growth, something tangible apart from FS (Financial Statements), invite their feedback on the web-tangible to engage them (unlikely to have any feedback but the perception of involvement is created), show them proof of online sales performance and improvement (hello SEOptimizers* and other online marketing folks) via summary analytics data, and show them the potential for growth in the online arena via research. It’s there, even in these down times. It has a track record of outperforming traditional methods in terms of ROA.

The asterisk (*) above is to testify to the fact that for most well defined and optimized online businesses or web sites, the organic traffic nearly always outperforms any other form of online advertising, including PPC in terms of both pure traffic and conversions, naturally resulting in the lowest cost per conversion apart from email, which is generally far more targeted, and limited in scope…

 ‘Something for EveryOne’ – It’s SEO, it works, it’s undeniable, it’s cheaper than almost any other form of online exposure, and it can be tailored to support every on and offline marketing initiative.

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Something for EveryOne? …. It’s SEO…

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