SEO Guide 101: SEO Is Still Mar­ket­ing And Mar­ket­ing Is Still Dri­ven By Creativity

An es­sen­tial as­pect of cre­ativ­ity is not be­ing afraid to fail. -Ed­win Land

In the SEO world, we of­ten get caught up with what’s go­ing to hap­pen with re­cent Google up­dates, rank­ings, er­rors, con­ver­sions, traf­fic, and a whole slew of other is­sues. But, in the midst of this hail­storm, we of­ten for­get that in the end, SEO is still mar­ket­ing, and mar­ket­ing is first and fore­most a cre­ative ven­ture. It only has over­tones of data be­ing used, SEO white-hat prac­tices, site-health, and so on.

There is no doubt that you should keep on top of good SEO prac­tices for a web­site, but re­ally, proper prac­tices don’t out­right at­tract cus­tomers. They may make the users ex­pe­ri­ence bet­ter, and keep the Google Gods ap­peased with an im­mac­u­late site health, but mar­ket­ing has been, and will al­ways be more than that. Just be­cause SEO is con­fined to the vir­tual world cer­tainly does not mean you’re stuck in box with what you can do. Cre­ativ­ity sells, and if that’s the name of the game, we should be sure to use that thought when do­ing SEO.

SEO Is Still Marketing

The job of any­one do­ing SEO is pri­mar­ily to at­tract po­ten­tial cus­tomers, re­tain their at­ten­tion, con­vince him or her that some­thing is worth buy­ing, and make the whole ex­pe­ri­ence pleas­ant enough that they may be will­ing to do it again, or in the least, re­fer some­one else to you.

There is so much fo­cus else­where nowa­days in the SEO world, you can sense the con­tin­u­ous anx­i­ety of peo­ple scram­bling to make sure they’re do­ing what Search En­gines want them to do, and again, this is needed. But to spend so much time wor­ry­ing rather than do­ing what is needed is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive at best.

And what is needed, are those 4 points above:

At­trac­tion, Re­ten­tion, Con­vinc­ing, and Pleasing. 

At­tract­ing Through Creativity 

At­tract­ing through cre­ativ­ity is what first comes to mind when think­ing of mar­ket­ing and SEO. In or­der to gain the at­ten­tion of any­one, you have to do some­thing that is at­tract­ing to one of their many senses. For the vir­tual world, we are lim­ited some­what as touch, smell, and taste are all cer­tainly ex­cluded. But even those can be touched upon in­di­rectly by im­bu­ing im­agery, or draw­ing on old mem­o­ries, such as grand­mas freshly baked cookies. 

But on­line, we are left with site and sound. With those two senses we need to con­jure up the oth­ers, and for clar­i­fi­ca­tion there are more than 5 senses. They cer­tainly be­come vague but are present nonethe­less. For in­stance, our sense of time, hu­mor, hunger, thirst, and the list goes on. But we can in­flu­ence those other senses on­line through the only two we have ac­cess to; those again be­ing site and sound. Im­agery is pow­er­ful, and when com­bined with sound, you can con­jure up all sorts of feel­ings in a per­son. I’m sure we all know this well enough.

Point be­ing, that at­tract­ing cus­tomers through SEO does not con­fine you to a world of key­words and rank­ings, site traf­fic and bounce rates. Sure those things are present and im­por­tant. But all the data and in­for­ma­tion in the world does not in it­self draw more traf­fic or con­ver­sions to your busi­ness. You have to be cre­ative with the data you have in or­der to be suc­cess­ful; you have to make some­thing of it. You sim­ply can’t read a few facts and say that needs to change, and it’s done. SEO is mar­ket­ing, and as such, those that do SEO are mar­ke­teers… we should all start to act like that. 

Re­tain­ing Through Creativity 

What bet­ter way to keep a per­son around than by im­press­ing them with some­thing hu­mor­ous, clever, in­for­ma­tional, top­i­cal, or sim­ply put… awe­some. You have to of­fer some­thing ap­peal­ing in or­der to keep the at­ten­tion of some­one you’ve worked hard to get. Again, this won’t come from the facts and data it­self, such as women lov­ing bracelets this fash­ion sea­son, base­ball wan­ing in pop­u­lar­ity, or the odd rise in pop­u­lar­ity for para­chute pants. That in­for­ma­tion means noth­ing on its own, but needs to be im­ple­mented in some fashion. 

This is where your awe-in­­spir­ing cre­ativ­ity comes in. If you man­aged to get a po­ten­tial cus­tomer to en­ter your site through some clever ad, a well de­signed in­fo­graphic, well writ­ten guest blog post, or even a sim­ple re­fer­ral, you then need to up the ante once they’ve en­tered your site. They went to your site due to some­thing cre­ative and clever prior, so you’re go­ing to have to be equally if not more cre­ative and clever once they’ve en­tered your site.

We all know that peo­ple love be­ing sold an im­age for in­stance. If you buy this bar of soap, you’re gonna be as soft as that ba­bies bot­tom. But once they en­ter the site, if there are no longer any vi­sual clues to the soap be­ing soft, and rather lets say the mes­sage be­ing sold now is that you’ll smell good. Well that’s nice and all, but I was more con­cerned with be­ing soft to the touch… not smelling of lavender.

The idea in the end is that the de­sign of a web­site is more than just proper SEO prac­tices. But a large por­tion of it is aes­thet­ics as well as er­gonom­ics. Peo­ple should be pleased by what they see, read, and en­vi­sion when they en­ter a web­site, and those things should fall in line with what is be­ing sold to them out­side of the web­site. It may sound a lit­tle dif­fi­cult… but hey… just be cre­ative.   

Con­vinc­ing Through Creativity 

This fol­lows the same lines as be­fore, where you can use im­agery to place an idea into someone’s thoughts with­out them re­ally know­ing that it has taken place. A sad per­son wants to be happy, and no­tices a smil­ing woman dri­ving in a con­vert­ible. An over­weight per­son wants to lose a few ex­tra pounds, and what do you know, there’s a story of a per­son who did just that. A bored per­son wants to be ex­cited; a hun­gry per­son wants to feel full. All of these ideas, and any oth­ers, can be sold through the only two senses we have at our dis­posal on­line, site and sound. 

You can con­vince peo­ple that by pur­chas­ing your prod­ucts, or vis­it­ing your web­site, they will have their hopes and dreams met. A lonely man wants to find a com­pan­ion? Well sir… at our site we have Binders of Women given to us di­rectly from Mitt Rom­ney. Any type of woman you can imag­ine could be met. Pic­tures of peo­ple meet­ing for the first time, laugh­ing and hav­ing fun on their first date, snug­gling up next to a fire, even testimonials.

And oddly…. That pretty much sums up Match.com mar­ket­ing strat­egy. They tried very hard to be as cre­ative for con­vinc­ing they can sell ro­mance and re­la­tion­ships on­line, and they’ve done a pretty good job of that. Their cus­tomers… were cer­tainly con­vinced that meet­ing the love of their life was pos­si­ble, maybe not cer­tain. But def­i­nitely pos­si­ble. 

Pleas­ing Through Creativity 

Fi­nally, if af­ter you’ve at­tracted a cus­tomer, re­tained their at­ten­tion, and con­vinced them to buy your prod­uct or use your ser­vice, you are go­ing to want to make sure that their ex­pe­ri­ence as a whole was pleas­ing enough such that they would use you again or rec­om­mend you. Ob­vi­ously if any of the first few stages failed, you wouldn’t have to worry over this one be­cause it wouldn’t mat­ter if they didn’t buy any­thing. But cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion is cru­cial, es­pe­cially in a day and age where any­thing to be up­set over could be seen and re­viewed by po­ten­tial cus­tomers down the road.

One of the worst prac­tices in SEO is the delet­ing or drown­ing out of neg­a­tive com­ments. Let’s not for­get why those com­ments were made… if they were so un­just they them­selves would be drowned out by the mul­ti­tude of pos­i­tive com­ments. So re­ally it should sig­nal for a busi­ness to get their act to­gether and not take it to heart. Re­ally, them voic­ing their opin­ion on what up­set them should help you to do bet­ter busi­ness by avoid­ing it in the fu­ture. Fol­low up emails, or thank you notes, even danc­ing kitty emails, any­thing to show your grat­i­tude for their ser­vice, and con­tin­ued con­cern over their be­ing a happy cus­tomer will go a very long way in en­sur­ing your cus­tomers are pleased. And as such, will­ing to use your prod­uct or ser­vices again. 

The idea here is that those do­ing SEO should not for­get the end goal in mind here. A ban­ner ad does noth­ing if it doesn’t at­tract, a guest blog post does noth­ing if it puts some­one to sleep, and an in­fo­graphic is wasted if its show­ing in­for­ma­tion in a dull way, or in­for­ma­tion that no one re­ally cares to know any­how. We have to be cre­ative still, even though we feel we are con­fined to a box de­signed by search en­gines and our­selves. And even if we were con­fined to a box, how would our cre­ative minds break free of that?