You Need an SEO Strategy: Gone Are the Days of Seeing What Sticks

Ask 10 search engine optimizers if they know the difference between a strategy and a tactic and I bet all 10 of them will nod their heads. If you then asked those same 10 people to give you an example of a strategy, 9 of them would in fact describe tactics instead and not even realize they did so.

Pointing out their error would likely elicit a response along the lines of, “It doesn't matter if I don't know the difference. I can optimize a site better than anyone!” Except it does matter because one day they're going to have to compete for the opportunity to work on a very large SEO project and what's going to really help them land the project is understanding the language that senior management uses. This understanding will help them craft a message that resonates with executives who are then more likely to sign the contract.

SEO Vision, Strategy, and Tactics

When a big SEO project comes your way, it's often accompanied by a vision from the project stakeholders that goes beyond the “get me more traffic” requests common of mom-and-pop sites. The vision will probably be something along the lines of “be the leader of such-and-such” or “be the most respected for this-and-that”. The best response to a vision statement is a strategy that describes the overarching approach to achieve the vision. And only when the strategy is vetted and has received general approval should you dive in to the actual steps i.e. the tactics that you'll use to fulfill the objectives of the strategy.

I'll admit that I once had a hard time wrapping my head around what having a strategy really meant. Yes, I was one of the 9 optimizers that would list tactics when asked for a strategy. What actually helped me understand the difference was working backwards. First, I listed all the things I do as a professional SEO such as keyword research, writing keyword-rich titles, removing session IDs from URLs, submitting links to directories, and analyzing web traffic reports. The list, as you can imagine, ended up being quite long. The light bulb started to brighten when I moved to the second step of marking each item as either being a tactic or a strategy. Much to my chagrin, not one of them qualified as a strategy. It then all came together with one simple question that popped into my head. If I executed a selected set of tactics perfectly and the results were as expected, how would the client's situation change over a period of 6 to 12 months? The answer to that question is the strategy that, had it been identified up-front, would've led to an appropriate list of tactics.

SEO Strategy in the Real-World

The problem is that while this backward approach is helpful for understanding concepts, it can be a time waster in practice since a lot of thinking can go in to figuring out the tactics that end up leading to a strategy that fails to address the vision. Instead, it is much more effective to start with a strategy and work your way through to the tactics.

Are you still unsure of the difference? Here are a couple of generic, but hopefully illustrative examples:

The Client's Vision: The CMO of Company A has been charged with making her company the market share leader for the recently developed Product A.

Your Analysis of the Situation: Company B's website which sells Product B is such an established authority that Company A's website will never rank #1 for relevant, high volume keywords.

Your SEO Strategy v1: Increase the perception of quality of Product A so that more people will buy from Company A.

Partial List of Tactics v1: Build a comprehensive resource around why Product A is better than Product B and use SEO best practices to obtain first page rankings. Use catchy browser titles to draw attention away from Product B's #1 ranking.

Your SEO Strategy v2: Build awareness for Product A with potential customers when they are in the research phase of the buying cycle so that when ready, they'll buy it instead of Product B.

Partial List of Tactics v2: Publish an information site that discusses issues and trends in the industry. Apply SEO techniques to the site to obtain search engine traffic. Place banner ads in highly visible locations on the information site to drive buyers to a site where they can purchase Product A.

Depending on the scope and budget, you could have multiple strategies and most certainly your list of tactics would be longer than my examples. You might also find that with your SEO projects there is significant overlap between the tactics used for different strategies and visions. Overlap is to be expected given that there's only a limited set of SEO tactics and many are closely related. The key idea is that a strategy will help you win the backing of senior management in a way that droning on and on about duplicate content, h1 tags, and PageRank will not. In addition, explicitly developing a strategy will help guide your team's thought processes and decision-making throughout the engagement.

So, what's your strategy?