We’ve just completed a number of SEO strategy projects for various clients. Part of our work here is to help folks understand what they’re getting into and why - to explain what separates a good keyword strategy from a stinker. I thought I’d share a bit of the thinking with you…

Your goal for SEO: to generate ‘high value’ prospective customer traffic.

‘High value’ means visitors who are engaged with your product / services set and are actively looking for help.

‘Prospective’ means visitors who are new, or relatively new to you / your site and are looking to you as a potential vendor and solutions partner.

Broadly speaking, you need to capture the interest of people who are researching solutions to problems that you can solve, and to divert their attention to strategic points within your web site.

How? Well, one big thing to consider is your KEYWORDS. (There’s more to SEO than this, but we’ll just concentrate on keyword principles for now…)

Your aim is to structure your on- and off-site content using the words that your audience is using to search the web - so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV content management software,’ then you need to align the language you use to describe yourself with these terms.

At the same time, you need to be aligning yourself with a set of keywords in a ‘win-able’ arena amongst competitors: some keywords will have no competition, others will be red hot.

In simple terms, this last point creates a ‘keyword index.’ You need to place a calculated bet on where you want to play. Your choice should be calibrated by the following formula:

Volume of daily searchers on any given key word

(…divided by)

Volume of other web pages that are optimised around those keywords

Clearly you want to engage with as many people as possible that are using search terms related to your products / services. At the same time, you want to position yourself where you can compete, given the resources you have to hand.

The challenge is best illustrated by a quick experiement….

If you’re in the business of software apps for sales support, you might choose to optimise around the term ‘CRM.’ This would currently give you an audience of 563 searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, it would also put you in direct competition with 129 million other web pages that are optimised on that term. Alternatively, if you were to focus your keywords around the concept of ’sales management software’ you’d have a total audience of around 50 searchers a day; and using this route, you’d be up against approximately 150,000 other pages.

Clearly the chances of capturing the attention of a ‘CRM’ searcher are more remote than for a ’sales management software’ searcher…. and this ought to give you plenty of food for thought, because conventional branding wisdom becomes a little cloudy in the face of hard data.

But choosing keywords is not just a question of running the numbers. Those branding considerations are absolutely essential to a successful SEO strategy.

For example, you need to consider the following things…

You brand equity – what’s does your overall investment in non-web language mean to this work? What about your sales patter and your product naming conventions? Do these things fit with your keyword findings?

Market maturity – does your current searching public really reflect where the market is at? Are you leading them or following them? What stage is your market in terms of possessing a common body of language to describe its problems and requirements?

Influential people – are industry analysts setting the market terms? Or are they just spinning far-fetched yarns? Do you need to follow or ignore them? What influence do they have on your customers? Will this influence matter tomorrow? Has it already had an impact?

Your resources – can you afford to compete in hotly competed areas? If you have a mega-budget, why not just nuke it out? If your resources are small, can you find smarter keyword arenas to play in?

The quality of the data sample – if you’re playing in niche territories, are you willing to bet a keyword / naming convention on a sample of 10 searchers per day? Once your product category matures, how are the trends going to change?

The state of the nation – can you afford not to play in competitive fields?

The above questions should create an interesting debate where branding ideas meet public perceptions of you and your products and services.

Ultimately, your SEO choices will be determined by your guts and your resources.

Some words of warning…

Be warned, branding babies should never be thrown out with the bath water.

Competition is also a key factor. To nuke it or to duck it is not always clear cut.

As ever, you’ll make plenty of branding compromises and web concessions along the way… The best advice we can give is to treat your keywords strategy as a journey - experiment, tweak and try again. The path to SEO nirvana wasn’t built in a day…

Early stage tech companies would do anything for those first few big wins — especially from blue-chip companies. But we’ve seen more than a few companies who were steered off course by these early wins. The early ‘champions’ were dream customers. They bought into the vision. They loved the product. They ‘got it’. How can that be bad?

The only problem is that these champions turned out to be extremely rare people. Like any early adopter (thanks Geoffrey Moore), they’re generally innovators and visionaries; they’re confident; they trust their own gut feel and are willing to work with young companies and unproven products. If these early champions didn’t exist, neither would the tech industry. But they can fatally mislead early stage tech companies.

Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is all about making the transition from these early adopter clients to a more mainstream audience who need different things and are moved by different messages. But we’ve worked with a handful of cases where the first one or two wins were the only wins in sight. In each case, the company, convinced by early success that they’ve got everything right, found it extremely hard to re-focus on the more common buyers: risk-averse people who need a lot more hand-holding and an easier-to-buy product

Also in each case, the vision itself was the problem. Not that it was wrong (usually it was simply ahead of its time) but that most buyers don’t want exciting new visions. They want specific problems solved. The early champions validated the entire vision, so that’s what the company continued to sell. They then waited forever for the next big win, getting bogged down in two-year sales cycles with prospects who look just like the early wins, but are fundamentally different.

Often, the answer is to downplay the vision a bit and break the product up into bite-sized applications. It’s painful, but it can spell the difference between getting customers to fund growth instead of needing lots of early stage investment capital (and the dilution it brings).

Early on, getting twenty $10k wins may actually be better than bagging that $200k elephant. They don’t trample your product development roadmap to suit their specific needs; the sales cycles are shorter; and the sales model is more replicable and scalable — it’s a foundation you can build a business on. One client, Sarah Haskell at Portrait Software liked to call these ‘pointy apps’ to differentiate them from the big, platform sell.

The right balance is to have a vision that underpins the smaller applications and puts them in context. And a set of apps that validate the vision.

No one would say you should turn down the big early wins. Just beware of being lured into the rocks by expecting more buyers to be just like the early ones.