Think Of Building Your Business Before You Think Of SEO

I often wonder whether there is a world beyond SEO. You may call it rhetoric but to me this seems to be an important matter especially when I see the hoopla surrounding online marketing. There seems to be an unseemly focus on finding a place on the first page of search results and in the process everyone seems to forget that all this effort is to sell a product or service. In fact, it looks as if there is no purpose except to win the search contest. In this confusion of identifying the ultimate goal we may be missing the woods for the trees.

It is all about making a sale

You must remember that making money still remains the main purpose of any business or enterprise. It doesn’t matter whether you have a great page rank. You may have thousands of hits on your website but unless there is a sale all the traffic would come to naught. Worse, if you are into pay-per-click or AdWords like program, you will be leaking out money for every click. Great ads may not translate into great money. Frankly and sadly, this is what is happening to many of us – we are bleeding money and don’t know where we have gone wrong. Who is to blame for this situation? I personally feel that there is too much of focus on finding prospective customers and too little on business of selling.

Begin at the beginning

Forget about keywords. Forget Google – first in my ‘forget’ list. You must focus on your business first. What are you selling? Who is your customer? Where will you find him or her? This kind of gives a perspective to your business. Is your product meeting customer expectations? Am I providing value? These are traditional business questions which still remain at the core of any marketing campaign.

Build your online marketing campaign on core values

Now that you have identified your customer and developed a killer product, it is time to visit Google. The beauty of this process is that the keyword strategy will now flow from your core values. This will create a harmonious environment where technology will meet business. You will not try to fit keywords into the product or other way around. This force-fit is what creates friction in the first place.

Here, a prospective customer will find what he is looking for when he clicks on your link. When this happens, the likelihood of a sale becomes much better. In tech-speak the click to sales ratio will increase dramatically. This will reduce your marketing spend also.

Why don’t we do this?

A good question and I think it has a lot to do with gravity. When we see a crowd doing something, it is only natural that we gravitate towards it without thinking things through. When we don’t succeed we blame ourselves thinking that we must have made mistakes. This is human psychology. We must therefore break out of this vicious circle and think afresh. When we start thinking about our business objectives first, the path becomes clear. Everything else follows.

Guest post by: Nitin Aggarwal is the owner and founder of the company Offshore Ally. It's is one of the leading source of competent virtual assistant and SEO link builders online. He is atech junkie and enjoys reading about new gadgets or the latest in Internet worls. Connect with him via Twitter.

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