SEO, Cult of Personality and a Serendipitous Meeting of the Minds

The landscape of online marketing advice is so vast and varied it’s hard to know who is worth paying attention to. As marketing managers and entrepreneurs, we’ve grown weary of the gurus, and even when they are right we’re probably not engaged enough to put theory into practice. Yesterday, however, serendipity was on my side. I discovered two blog posts that, together, said something compelling about the future of SEO. Honestly, I can’t say any piece of web marketing literature has caught my attention this way in a very, very long time.

What made my find all the more delicious is that the post authors are unlikely comrades.

Despite its trite title, Seth Godin’s How to Make Money with SEO points to what could be a tectonic shift in how web marketers look at search. And how small business owners look at their own web marketing aspirations. Instead of clawing their way to the top of the search engines in hopes of being discovered by someone who actually wants what they are selling, Godin suggests the likelihood of converting traffic into paying customers is much greater if you apply a digitized version of build-it-and-they-will-come. Carve out a name for what you are and what you do, literally, and web users will actively search out that name on Google. Eventually, your name (your trademark) will start to rank high because everyone is talking about you–and linking to you–on their websites.

In the slightly tangential but still worth mentioning category:

I don’t know how versed Godin is in SEO, but I wonder if he knows much about title tags? i.e. If I put “Karri Flatla” in all my title tags and get even a couple of back links, I am going to come up number one in Google for the search term “Karri Flatla.” Unless of course someone else happens to be optimizing their site for the exact same name. Unlikely, but possible I suppose.

Title tag tangent aside, Godin’s theory holds merit, more merit than our marketing sage perhaps realized.

Over at Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, blogger Peter Da Vanzo digs into a more practical discussion. In The Importance of Brand and Networking, Da Vanzo explains how cult of personality could lead to enhanced search visibility. Given the prominent role social media plays with propagating branded messaging across the web, Da Vanzo says it’s entirely reasonable to expect that Google will find a way to measure this awareness.

As a brand, and the branded terminology as it relates to that brand, is talked up in online social circles, more and more web pages will link back to the originating website (brand owner). Page rank increases alongside public relations efforts. In effect, one kind of “PR” serves another. Public relations serves page rank. And the intangible forces of goodwill and positive word of mouth become something algorithmically measurable by the marketing magic that is social media.

This should make a lot of marketers and small business owners happy. It means that Internet fame (and fortune) is within reach. In a way, these serendipitous postings by two bloggers illustrate that we can all have a piece of the viral marketing pie, but only by applying the principles in sustained fashion, engaging  our audience purposefully and with intent to build momentum over the long run.

Small Business Search Marketing Takeaways:

1. Stop obsessing over a handful of competitive, generic keywords. Even if you’re lucky enough to win the search lottery (as Godin describes it), these terms don’t convert well, because finding you at the top of the search engine results was a haphazard effort by the searcher to begin with. (Okay, so maybe Godin knows a little more about SEO than even he realizes. SEOs have been preaching this advice since God was a kid, but maybe some of you will listen to a non-SEO more than you listen to our supposedly half-baked advice. Oh, did I say that out loud?)
2. Make them come to you. Your long run objective in web marketing should be for your target audience to actively seek you out, not you begging for the sale with a number one spot in Google. That might get you lots of traffic, but it doesn’t do much for your brand and the word of mouth that follows from a strong one. While you must always market to who your audience is already, it’s better to have them come to you. Pull is better than push.
3. Finding a niche isn’t enough. You must build a brand–a story–around your niche. To build a memorable story though, you must create a niche within a niche. In doing so, you’ll create a mini movement. This is what gets people talking, and linking, back to you. The back links that result will be of high quality due to relevance and, if the right people are talking, page rank.
4. Attach a trademark to your brand, not a logo but a searchable phrase. Add other monikers or catch phrases to your brand but only if they compliment, not cannibalize, your core message. Eventually, people will start to search on the “branded copy” and use it in the online conversation. Social media is where and how this will happen. Google succeeds when its search algorithms mimic user priorities. Therefore, Google will find ways to measure brand conversations and reward those brands with higher rankings.

So, all this marketing wisdom comes from two blog posts that are perhaps worth more together than they are separately. Did Seth and Aaron go for coffee recently? Did Peter make a secret phone call to Seth before he posted? Did they talk about SEO and personal branding and how they will merge by way of social media? I wonder. The fact that a branding evangelist sees eye to eye with a SEO evangelist is thought provoking to say the least.

The Bottom Line for Small Business Marketing Online:

Tell a story and tell it well. Tell it consistently and across multiple social media channels. Know the popular search terms as they relate to the deeply niched brand you want to cultivate. Then build a story using the long tail of those keywords, peppering that story with your branded copy.

I don’t normally advocate sexy marketing. After all, public relations is a pretty staid marketing tactic, even online. But using PR to leverage your search visibility? Now that’s hot.

What are you doing to cultivate a brand within your niche? How will you effectively tie your brand to search? Or are Godin and Da Vanzo off the mark?