For just under ten years now that I’ve been working in marketing and sales, I’ve noticed that, in these fields, there are always countless people ready to give their opinion on your work. It’s funny, personally, I can’t see myself going to the engineering office and explaining to an engineer that they need to put a size 13 screw in one place rather than a size 11 screw. He probably ran calculations to make his choice; he followed a logic and a process that I don’t know. The difference is that in marketing in particular, everyone feels that we come up with strategies or positioning out of thin air and that these can be debated over drinks at the bar. There’s a reason for that: we’re all consumers, so we all see ourselves a little as specialists in consumption.
In the Internet world, it’s worse: we’re all Internet users, and the Internet is part of our lives for listening to music, managing our accounts, doing our shopping… talking about the Internet is a bit like entering people’s private sphere. And then more and more people are creating their Facebook page, running blogs, and putting personal websites online. The little SEO tinker’s tips and tricks make the rounds on forums, people fiddle around, test things, have fun.
When it comes time to work professionally to build a strategy around a site, things get complicated. Faced with a method, a content- and user-oriented approach, a search for the most appropriate channels, you get advice from the client’s friends and relatives who explain to you in a professorial tone:
“Your site is poorly ranked because for the query “thingamajig”, we’re not on the first page of Google” (what a brilliant observation…)
“For that to happen, you need to put the following keywords in the page source code, etc.” (here we go, so there is a magic trick for all of us to be number 1 on Google…)
You want people to vote for the site on Wikio?
“This approach seems a bit empirical to me” (it’s true that we only do this for about fifty companies).
All of this, of course, on the recommendation of Michel, specialist in delicatessen meats:
“Jojo, since you know all about that, couldn’t you give Christelle some advice, her site is poorly ranked”.
And I keep tirelessly repeating to clients that having a well-ranked website is about quality content, quality backlinks, quality internal links, a good architecture and… time. Who do you think they feel like believing?
