SEO/SEM for the independent professional service provider

January 14, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Search engine optimization is an area I’m finally getting to. I think like any other “latest big thing”, its difficult to wade through the hype and the thousands of people who profess expertise with little to back it up, except what sounds to me like, hype regurgitation or a strategy to “beat the system”.

But I do have a gut sense that the time has come, and for a professional service provider, “what you don’t know you don’t know”, could bite you in terms of cost of doing it wrong, or cost of not doing it at all. I’m still in early experimental stage (Google AdWords only) and very much a neophyte, but I’ve learned quite a bit.

Since I’ll do just about anything to avoid wordy reports or spreadsheets, I’ve attempted to diagram a high-level evaluation and decision-making framework for SEO. I used my business, RedShift as the case study and found it useful to extend the web architecture diagram that I included in a previous post.

(click to enlarge)

redshift_web_expanded_small.png

So now that I can “see” the steps and choices, the big question is: how to increase the probability of success of an SEO or AdWords campaign? Maybe even before that, the right question is: Does this make sense?

I’m not sure it makes sense for every professional services provider, but there is opportunity to reach more prospects and learn a great deal with a small investment.

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