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It's all about relationships. Customers are won by nurturing relationships. These relationships may be born in marketing campaigns, chance meetings, trade-shows, cold-calling, or... yes, even the humble search engine hit. Search hits can lead to the smallest of business-to-consumer (B2C) sales, or to the largest of government contracts. It can lead to partnerships and acquisitions. The search is so important and central to business today, that it's now the duty of every company to adequately address search engines as a primary means targeting messages, as important as print, broadcast and the media.
On the Internet, these relationships often begin life in amorphous indeterminate clouds. The Net is just a large space occupied by many people. And in this space, we try to attract visitors to our websites. Often, it is not until after a number of interactions, do these potential relationships begin to solidify into solid prospects, and ultimately into customers. The trick in all cases is to move people along in their journey from anonymous visitor to qualified prospect, to actual customer. This is as true of multi-million dollar strategic business sales, such as business software, as it is of B2C eCommerce, such as clothing. The only difference is in the length of the sales cycle. So, search engine optimization (SEO) can be viewed as feeding the mouth of the sales pipeline, and helping to move things along in the process. SEO can be viewed as a 24/7 sales-person working on your behalf, with just the right message at just the right time, each time the prospect returns to the Internet to search. Therefore, competent SEO is all about the long, gradual build to critical mass, wherein you are the dominant site found on that topic, in many search engines, on many relevant word variations, and over long periods of time.
A Prospect should be likely to encounter a well optimized site over and over, until the odds are actually in your favor to forge that relationship. Once attracted to the site, the company then has the opportunity to start a dialog and form a relationship with them. While the majority of searchers may not be qualified customers, a percentage of them are and the company that actively courts this group will have that many more customers than it would have had otherwise.
In order to attract this business, a company must cast a net out onto this internet cloud in hopes of reaching the target audience. In order to do this, the site must have a large surface area, constituting the size of the net and attracting a large range of searchers. It must also have granularity, making a finely-woven net that has valuable information on each specific topic. This is achieved through creating new content that spans a large range and is concentrated in each area it covers so that searchers come across the site and find it useful in their decision process. All this forms a diversity of information so that your site appears under a variety of keyword searches.
In rare instances, a site is so effective that the first hit from a search engine compels the visitor to link to that site, which in turn increases the odds of new search hits. If compelling enough, a self-perpetuating process builds the site to critical mass, and little deliberate search engine optimization efforts are needed to catapult the site to the top of the search engine results. But in many cases, professional help is needed to achieve this build, and eventually reach "escape velocity". What SEO can do through content writing and outreach efforts is to make a site more effective, thereby stimulating this self-fueling phenomenon. Over time, you become systematically more exposed to people searching within your particular industry so that they are bound to encounter you time and time again. In time, this process can become self-fueling as the optimization work truly turns your site into the most authoritative source of information in the industry, and many visitors choose to link to you for this reason alone.
The search engine approach to attracting customers is sometimes thought of as a shotgun option that lacks the accuracy and finesse of other marketing methods. But because the Prospects are proactively researching topics in your area, they are actually uniquely pre-qualified. The cost of customer acquisition becomes stunningly low on sites that have committed to this strategy for some time and have achieved naturally dominant top search engine results (imagine not even having to run a PPC campaign). And in some cases, companies in this position have become hyper-aggressive about aggregating ALL the sales leads in their industry, shutting out their competition before they even had a chance.
This kind of search engine dominance particularly helps in high-end products, which are strategic acquisitions for business. Big ticket items have the rule of touches where it takes a certain number of interactions with a customer before a sale will be made. Not only can SEO get you that all-important first contact, but as they turn back to the Internet for assurances that they are making the right decision, you can generate the second, third, and fourth touch. This kind of repeated exposure to consistent messaging indicating that you are making the right choice is known in Marketing as cognitive resonance. SEO is a particularly powerful vehicle for resonating your message. Not only can all roads lead to your site, but all attempts at research can corral them back.
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