SEO is conceptually the same as ‘Traditional’ Marketing. Here’s why.

SEO is often heralded as a magic, arcane art that will suddenly turn your shitty, poorly built website into a lead generating, sales driving, revenue making machine. It won’t. That’s ridiculous, unreasonable and just plain fanciful.

Anything that gives unbelievable results for seemingly minimal input is one of two things. Bullshit, or a ticking time bomb that might take your hand off. Look at all the infamous blackhat SEO ‘growth hacks’. What a hideous term. Before too long, they all imploded. Embedding your website’s URL into the footer of a thousand websites with anchor text exact-matching your primary keyword. Brilliant, but a cheap gimmick that was crushed before it could truly take flight.

Sure, some people profited from that particular phenomenon, but not for long, and not with long-lasting results. The game is endurance, longevity and innovation. Growth hacking might expedite some of the processes, but it isn’t your magic answer.

SEO isn’t a holy grail or some wild secret. It’s marketing.

Marketing is simple. Understanding it, is simple. The why, how, what of it all is incredibly easy to comprehend.

Understand a problem people have. Solve it. Tell them you solved it.

That’s really all there is to it. Disagree with me? Take any campaign, any successful company, any story worth telling and I’ll show you it fits. There’s a thousand words and concepts, some better than others, some complete shit, and some concepts that will make it even more simple.

But the crux of it is those three steps. As Mark Ritson likes to summarise it so succinctly, marketing is diagnosis, strategy and tactics. Different words for the same three things.

Understand, make a plan, execute.

Stay with me. In the marketing world, we like to confuse ourselves. We like to use big words and fancy concepts to make sense of seemingly simple things. For sure, brilliant communications strategies and world-class branding exercises are the secrets to Coca Cola’s success. But at the core of what they are, they’re just telling people about their solution.

Seth Godin’s philosophy of understanding your customer’s world view is the same as Mark Ritson’s hammering on about the importance of segmentation and positioning. It’s all the same concept.

Understand the problem. Who has it, why they have it, and why they care about it. Then understand what it is that will solve it, for them. Solutions look different to different people. Finally, make sure your solution aligns with their beliefs, their worldview- this is your positioning.

SEO is just the same.

Sure, we use expensive software and fancy spreadsheets with enormous quantities of data. But the data is just the problem, repeated over and over and over again in different ways. We call these search queries, and they’re built on keywords.

SEO is understanding what people are searching for, and the words they use to describe it. It’s understanding what people mean when they google ‘seo in Perth’. Did they misspell ‘sea’? No, they’re looking for someone to hand them the leads, revenue, and sales.

So answer that need, and create an SEO business- everyone’s asking you for it. Then tell them you have it. SEO is just good descriptions on your website. It’s annotating your images correctly. It’s good, descriptive page titles and meta descriptions (even though they don’t affect your SERP). It’s being neat, and organised with your internal links, and making sure you’re cited as an expert by other websites.

Understand what people are looking for. Be what they’re looking for. Tell them you’re here.

SEO is just one small part of marketing a business. But it’s a wonderful example of how it’s all the same concept. Tell the right people that you’re their perfect solution to their problem.

So how do you win?

Be better. Be better every single day. Answer your customer’s questions more thoroughly, meet their needs more effectively, write copy that sings to their souls. Create designs that capture their interest more than others. Show them your product or service is the best, and tell them how it’s going to change their lives.

Marketing isn’t hard, per se. It just takes effort- hard work, and good intentions. That’s where most marketers seem to go wrong. Stop looking for a secret, a leg up or hack. Just be better, ask more questions, and talk to your customers. Understand them, and then deliver.