While some are harking on about whether SEO is dead or what the newest form of safe link building is others (like the crowd and speakers at MozCon last week) believe that value driven Internet marketing is alive and well. The message rang loud and clear from the likes of Rand Fishkin, Richard Baxter, Wil Reynolds and resonated with the audience.
Where do we find value in Internet marketing? Isn’t SEO just optimizing for the Google Bot?!
We’re not talking about a fancy name change from SEO Specialist to Inbound Marketer. And no, your Facebook status update spam is not replacing link building.
Yet it does look like this Coca Cola Advertisement. It’s in Spanish, but the message is pretty easy to understand without the words “exercise a little and don’t believe in magic diet pills.” It doesn’t have much to do with Coke products at all, but it gives value to an already Coke product saturated audience.
Coca Cola “Magic Pills” from srmayor on Vimeo.
Lifetime Customers and the Holistic ROI
Bringing it home, I reminisce to when Coca Cola awarded me with $10,000 to do an internship in Thailand. No rules, no strings attached, I simply was one of many Coca-Cola World Citizenship Scholarship winners. Does Coke know the exact return on its investment with me and whether in the end it will have made a favorable ROI? No. Does it matter? No. Sure, at the end of the day they need to sell more Coke products but they’re not trying to gain more exposure, I can’t think of one American who doesn’t know what Coke is. But I met many Thai’s who didn’t and in both increasing the Coca-Cola brand in Thailand as well as granting me one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, I’d say this is the inspiration for value driven marketing.
Goodbye SEO for Bots
This is my final farewell to link building for link building sake and any another other robot-driven SEO tactic.
My SEO will be to create clear, concise and meaningful content styled with lean code and marked-up so the SERP can provide detail and meaning. My Internet marketing strategies will be based on the business’s principles, consumer research and bringing out the value of the product or service to the consumer. I will challenge my clients not to measure in clicks or likes; rather focus on the success of their business and increase in value and earnings over time.
Over here at Vektor Studio I know my partner agrees with this approach and that our clients appreciate it and for now that’s what matters the most to me.
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