I have given talks to companies and held one-to-one seminars for individuals and the moment I mention SEO strategy I pretty much get the same reaction. First there is that slight furrowing of the eyebrows as they consider what they know about search engine optimization, or what they think they know, then they start to tell me about placing postings on networks and spending endless hours doing keyword research and finally they tell me proudly about their content creation strategy and how this reflects well upon their organization.

They are, of course, wrong. The difference between what they tell me they do and what I ask is the same as that between going out to buy the ingredients for a good meal and cooking it. In the first instance you acquire some raw materials which tick all the boxes of you intending to prepare a great meal: special types of meat, exotic vegetables, oils from the Far East and herbs from the Med plus some choice types of port. In the second instance, however, you temporarily acquire the skills of a masterchef and put the raw ingredients together into a mouth-watering recipe.

SEO is not much different. You can spend a lot of time hitting the individual parts of the optimization process done in a mechanical, piece-meal manner and the success you will achieve will be uncoordinated, poor in terms of the effort you have put in place and ultimately disheartening, trapping you or your SEO team in an endless cycle of mechanically repetitive actions the true value of which is difficult to ascertain. Or you can put together a real SEO strategy which takes into account your commercial imperatives, the needs of your customer base and the development of the market in which you operate.

You see instantly that the moment I begin to discuss SEO in terms of commercial drives, customer needs and home market developments you realize two things: first that these are activities and information which lie outside the reach of the SEO department who may not even be aware of them and second that you do not need to have in-depth SEO skills or even knowledge in order to successfully create and co-ordinate an SEO strategy.

With this in mind you realize that SEO is just a new spin to an old problem: how to deliver to your customers the message that their needs are being addressed by what your company does. Even with a highly trained SEO team in place adept at all the technical aspects of it, having a clearly understood SEO strategy means that all the different elements of your commercial infrastructure fit in neatly with the actions of your online promotional activities right from the start. This prevents you from wasting valuable time and money fixing problems in your online visibility which occur precisely because the co-ordination of all the different aspects was not there to begin with.