As recently as not long ago, a project manager was telling me about a kickoff meeting with an industrial client (at Eureos, we begin web projects with a marketing study). While the subject of the meeting concerns the company’s market positioning, its competitors, its offer, its strengths, the client has only one word on his lips: keyword. As is often the case in the world of Internet marketing, clichés and (bad) reflexes take precedence over deeper thinking. After constantly hearing on forums that the essential thing is to rank first for the query “thingamajig” or “whatchamacallit,” business leaders have nothing but this obsession in mind.
Then begins a long educational effort, which consists of explaining that an Internet strategy based on a list of 10 keywords has a high chance of failing for several reasons:
1. It is risky
Google is independent, and the algorithm is constantly evolving. People who claim “100% success in organic SEO for your keywords” are liars, or at best they fail to mention that these are niche queries. SEO work on high-potential queries is long, laborious, and requires significant resources, with very weak guarantees of success (if there were a magic instruction manual, we would know it…).
2. It is reductive
Many novices underestimate the fact that the queries typed by internet users to search for a service or a product are not always the generic query imagined by companies. Thus, a person looking for a rainwater collector will type very different things such as “water recovery tank,” “cheap water collector,” or even “recover water for toilets.” You therefore need above all to work on content quality in order to benefit from traffic coming from what is akin to “the long tail.”
3. It is partial
Although Google’s market share remains overwhelming compared with its competitors (Yahoo and Bing in particular), that does not mean a successful site should bet everything on the leading search engine. It should be known that a single well-placed message on a mainstream forum can bring in more qualified traffic than dozens of keywords on Google. The rise of social networks is also an important parameter to take into account.
Moreover, while generating targeted traffic is essential, it is no less indispensable to convert those visits into contacts or purchases. Which is preferable: having a site with 50 visitors per day and 5 quote requests, or 500 visitors per day and 1 request every two weeks?
The key: clearly define the company’s positioning
So, before rushing headlong into a list of keywords (which also needs to be done; the point is not to avoid this issue), it is essential, as in real life, to carry out in-depth marketing thinking about the company, its services, and its products: what are the specific features of the offer, how does the company differentiate itself? What is the competition’s positioning? These are the questions, among others, that must first be answered in order to define an editorial line that will make it possible to reach its audience, participate in forums in a relevant way, and, for example, bring internet users together through social networks. This editorial line will also be a key element in converting traffic into contacts. One can then speak of a business development approach, and not of “SEO,” which is only one link in the chain among others.
