Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

actually represent good SEO opportunities, and it may be easier to convince

your boss to give you ownership of yours!

• Use your powers of competitive analysis. As you go through your Prep Month in

Chapter 6, “Your One-Month Prep: Baseline and Keywords,” take special care

to note if your competitors’ sites are doing things well in the areas in which your

site is lacking. This may motivate those in power to give your recommended

changes a higher priority.

• Focus on

off-page

SEO activities. While you’re waiting to get your site spiffed

up, you can always work on removing outdated listings and cleaning up old

links to your site.

• As a last resort, if your current site is so hopeless that it’s actually doing your

business more harm than good, you might decide to take drastic measures and

disinvite the search engines. We’ll show you how in Part III, “Your SEO Plan.”

SEO Infighting at UpperCut and Jab, Inc.

Here’s a true story involving UpperCut and Jab, Inc.(company name and some identifying details

have been changed to prevent embarrassment), which provides IT consulting and solutions for

large businesses. One of the company’s primary goals is new client acquisition.

In this corner:A Sales Force with Very Practical Needs

They like to have lots of corporate

information, white papers, and case studies online.They use these as sales tools while they are on

the phone or on the road in a meeting with potential clients. Sounds like a great use of a website,

and one that doesn’t require any SEO or any sort of call to action.With their hands already full,the

sales team does not want to waste their time responding to unqualified leads.

In this corner: A Marketing Team with a Vision

The marketing team, on the other hand, would

like to see the website gathering leads.They want a functioning request for information (RFI) form

and a generously budgeted SEO campaign to drive traffic to it.

The plan of attack

Both departments have good points, but the burden is on the marketing

team to fine-tune the SEO campaign so that incoming leads are high quality and not a waste of

anybody’s time or money.

So who wins?

Unfortunately, nobody.The marketing team was successful in driving a great deal of

traffic to the RFI form! But, uh-oh, a vast majority of forms were filled out by unqualified leads.

(“Does so-and-so still work there?”“Can you help me with a broken printer?”) Looks like they forgot

about defining their target audience.The RFI form—a potentially great lead generation tool—was

eventually dropped.

The moral of the story

Bringing traffic to your site is not necessarily the same as meeting your

company’s goals!

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