5 SEO Process Steps I Use For START Rankings Over Time

The Marketing Triumvirate And Borrowing From Taguchi

I started with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing before AdWords was launched and I even worked as a technical editor for the official “AdWords For Dummies.”

However, before that I was involved with SEO, and PPC was much easier since you could simply buy your traffic.

I want to talk to you today about how search marketing, PPC, and offline marketing all integrate. No one piece is really separate from the others. I’ve found that each leg of this triumvirate informs the other two.

When you put them all together, a lot of great results can become possible.

I have a specific process that I use in putting together my own marketing plans and I can walk you through how I set up my own campaigns to hit on each of the three segments.

When I was still learning I came across what’s known as the Taguchi Method which taught me how to frame tests with my website and search terms in order to verify an end-user action.

This method of thinking is essentially what I’ve applied to my marketing work across the board.

This methodology can actually be applied throughout your life and business, and to me, that’s the sign of a strong strategy.

I call them “Fractal Strategies” because they work in the micro as well as the macro.

I use an acronym to describe my marketing process. It’s START.

S – Strategy / Story

The “S” is for strategy or story, in the case of SEO marketing the story is easy to take care of because there are only 4 different stories operating in a market at one time. There’s your product’s story, your customer’s story, your story as the marketer, and the market’s story itself.

We can break it down further from there.

In SEO it’s all based on keywords and every keyword has its own stories attached to it. Keywords can be exact matches, phrase matches, long tail keywords, a buying keyword, or an observation keyword. These are all ways to describe the story of a particular keyword.

Define these and write them out for each keyword related to your marketing campaign.

T – Tactics / Things To Do

The “T” is tactics or things to do. Write out everything you need to accomplish for your campaign.

This might include things like keyword research, writing out the ad, building a landing page, and setting up your autoresponder.

All these pieces need to happen!

Here’s where it gets tricky because in order to be successful with search marketing you have to get all these things done.

You have to know what you are willing to do and what you’re not willing to do.

The items you’re not willing to do might become potential bottlenecks for your business.

A – Action

The “A” is executing on all the actions you’ve listed out as described in the previous two sections.

R – Results

When you’ve taken all your actions it’s time to look at the results.

What’s your conversion rates look like? Did they download any content?

A lot of the times people get the story in their heads but don’t take action.

There’s no way to get to results if you go that route.

T – Track, And Test Over Time

The last “T” is to continue to monitor your metrics from your results as you run future campaigns.

This means you need to go back to the beginning and refine your “S” and “T” and take new actions in the “A.”

This process works as a loop and you can keep running it until you have a new story.

This is my methodology and I’ve used it now for ten years both with SEO and in my life as well.

Action Steps

1. Write out the 4 stories operating in your market and the stories that apply to your keywords as well.
2. Write out all the tactics required to run your campaign, detail the steps needed to complete each step in your process.
3. Take action and execute all your steps.
4. Record your results and see where you were successful and where you fell short.
5. Refine your campaign and track how your results improve over time.

 

Result You Will Achieve

A methodology to apply to the SEO campaigns that will give you a strong process that will improve your results over time.

This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.