Search Engine Optimization Is Dead, Long Live Web Presence Optimization

“The Web Is Dead” screamed the cover of Wired Magazine last year. At first I thought to myself, yeah right! Then as if enlightened I thought to myself, they are absolutely right. Consumers are spending less and less time on the web and spending more time on social platforms, apps, mobile devices… it was about that time that I broke into a cold sweat. As one of the largest search engine optimization companies in India, all we had ever done is optimized websites for clients. Will we also cease to exist once the web dies?

It is in desperate times like these that one needs to change the question. The question is “What do we need to do to remain relevant?” The answer is simple – instead of optimizing websites, we would need to learn how to optimize the web presence for clients.

Now that we have a head start, the time has come for us to share the need for web presence optimization, benefits, and mainly ideas and processes that large enterprises can follow to execute a web presence strategy.

Need for Web Presence Optimization

In the early days of the Internet, the company website was the primary source for information for consumers. Today consumers are engaging with brands through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, mobile applications, etc., thus it is almost essential for your prospects to find you during these engagements.

Benefits

Making two into 10: Most search engines including Google list only two results from your website even for your brand search. Unless you have optimized for the web, all the remaining results on the first page of Google shall be results that you don’t control. When you optimize for “web presence,” the first 10 results from the search engine could be controlled by you.

Online reputation management: Consumers have a tendency to click on a negative result of a brand rather than a positive review, thus in many cases less flattering results find a place in the top 10 results.

Shortcut to ranking: It is getting increasingly difficult to rank your website for core terms as search engines give a lot of importance to the age of the domain as well as the age of the back links. Universal search of Google makes it easier to identify lack of universal content for specific keywords and then create a content creation strategy to rank for the same.

Traffic from the right psychographic audiences: If you deal in car insurance, you can target SEO for only keywords such as car insurance. However, in web presence optimization, you can target people who are from specific psychographics. Example: a video that demonstrates what precautions you must take when you go off-road.

Creating intellectual property: Web presence optimization is about creating content in terms of videos, photographs, blogs,and social/mobile applications, all of which becomes IP for the brand. It may continue to engage your target group for years to come, the older the content, the better value it delivers in the web optimization process.

Multiplier effect on paid media: Web presence optimization not only helps in organic traffic, but it also helps in reducing cost of clicks on paid media. Google Quality Score is getting more and more dependant on landing page content as well user engagement after the click, thus reducing cost of paid media in the process.

Ideas to Execute Web Presence Optimization

Web presence optimization is about creating content for the right psychographic audiences rather than demographics, thus one needs to forget the conventional process of SEC, age, gender, and focus on what is the lifestyle of your perfect target group and what content shall be most relevant to them. Here are some tools that you can use to aid the process.

Google traffic estimator tool: Today one can identify the approximate number of searches for any keyword; this must be the starting point for web presence-oriented content creation. If no one is searching for that keyword, it may not make sense creating content for the same.

Identify low-hanging fruit: Once you have identified the type of content you should create, analyze the content that is currently raking for that keyword from universal search point of view. Fight battles that are easier to win, no use creating content where the top eight ranks are dominated by authoritative sites that may be difficult to beat. You will also find an obscure image, video, or blog ranking for a high volume keyword; start your journey there.

Using paid media to beef up value of content: Most of the universal search algorithms take the number of video views into account while ranking that content. It may be a good idea to create the initial video views through social media and paid media. Initially, the snowball requires a push to start rolling.

Identifying strategies for different segments of universal search: Each unit of universal search content requires a different strategy, thus one cannot have a uniform strategy to rank for all parts of web presence optimization. It is important to segment universal search into video, images, news, wiki, social media, and user-generated content while planning the execution of a web presence endeavor.

Google Trends and Insights: Google Traffic estimator gives you an idea of the number of searches for the last month, while Google Search Insights and Trends allow you to predict the future. If a keyword is showing a hockey stick curve trend, it may be a good idea to create content in advance based on the trend.

Web analytics: Many a time we get enamored by the volume of searches and forget about the keywords that deliver the conversions to us. It is important to balance the web presence optimization strategy with keywords that are converting into customers.

You can use surveys to create content. The key is to start the journey and once you start, the content engagement itself would give you insights on how further content creation can be planned.

My company believes that content creation is also the spinal cord of your social media strategy, thus brands can receive benefits across organic, paid, and social media by planning and executing a strategic content creation strategy as a part of their marketing endeavors.