Until recently I headed up technical marketing for Yahoo Media, where our competition was in verticals like news, sports, movies, games, and finance to name a few. In terms of online competitiveness, this is nothing to sneeze at. This is how I learned to base everything I do on strategy.

A Lesson Learned

Let me tell you a story. Early in my tenure at Yahoo we tried to get into the site dev process in the early stages in order to work SEO into the Product Recommendations Documents (PRD) before wireframing began.  But as a fairly new horizontal group not reporting into any of the products, this was often difficult. Nay, damn near impossible.  So usually we made friends with the product teams and got in where we could.

On one specific project, one of the SEOs on my team was brought in during the wireframe stage.  T­he entire product team held SEO-specific meetings every week to go over specific recommendations, taking them very seriously, and leaning on every word our team said.  We were thrilled.  We were hailing their efforts, promising big wins for the relaunch, and even hyping up the launch and it’s projected SEO results in the company SEO newsletter.

Then the site relaunched. Initially we saw a drop. This is expected, especially when you relaunch an entire site of that magnitude.  Three weeks passed, and results were flat.  Five weeks passed, no upward trend.  Three months passed and the product team stopped talking to us. Results never went back up.

Search Traffic drop after relaunch

Like many SEOs, I was hired with one vague responsibility: to set up an SEO program and achieve results.  Like many SEOs, we jumped right in and started spewing out SEO audits, rewriting title tags, offering up link suggestions, rewriting URLs and so on.  And like many SEOs we promised results. But what we didn’t do, until that fateful launch, was develop a comprehensive strategy.  Sure, we did keyword research, we recommended partnerships and widgets and architecture advice, but we didn’t step back and take a good look at our target audiences, what sites were meeting their specific needs in search results, and what we specifically could build into the product that would be far more desirable than what everyone else had (not even thought of yet ideally) to make sure our entire site is superior, resulting in the inevitable stealing of search traffic from our competitors.

Instead, in this instance, we started at wireframe stage, plopping in keywords and meta tags.  Of course, the site really needed those things, and although it launched technically “optimized”, it wasn’t enough to provide a better product than our top competitor(s).  A product that people want to visit, revisit, email to friends, share on social networks, and link to more than our competitors.  It wasn’t even enough to move up in the rankings.

From that point on, if a property didn’t consult our team during the early concepting stages of a project, we shied away from working on that project at all. And let me tell you, things got a lot better.

An 8-Step Strategy for you to use

Doing SEO strategy right takes targeted competitive insight and very specific recommendations, beyond any SEO basics rulebook. And ideally a good relationship with the product (site) manager.

I’ve been writing an SEO Strategy Guide at SEOmoz where I share a detailed 8-step process for creating your own SEO strategy, starting with defining target audiences, and taking it all the way through categorizing keywords into topics, finding Gaps & Opportunities, doing competitive research, press release strategy, and ending up with a set of detailed, very specific recommendations that go far beyond the regular out-of-the-box SEO recommendations.  This is the kind of stuff that can be far more useful to the client than an automated SEO check, and it’s the kind of stuff that starts to draw the line between the novices and the pros.

Here are the posts so far:

1. The 8-Step SEO Strategy, Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
2. Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
3. Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
4. Define Competitors: Step 4 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
5. Spying on (and Learning from) Your Competitors: Step 5 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
6. Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations: Step 6 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
7. Must-Have SEO Recommendations: Step 7 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
8. Prioritize and Summarize – Final Step of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

I hope they’re insightful and help you to provide quality insights for your own sites and your clients’ sites.

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