Most marketers understand the inherent value of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as part of their overall Search Engine Marketing (SEM) efforts. The higher up your company appears in the search results of any given search engine (we mostly focus on Google) the more chances you have of getting a participant to click through to your website or microsite…and then the conversion battle begins. This focus on SEO, driven by aggressive sales people and Google’s use of the Page Rank tool bar (giving us a simplified metric to obsess over), coupled with a lot of media coverage, can be a dangerous focus point for businesses.

There is no doubt that SEO in the overall marketing mix is critical. SEM is a primary consideration for managing your Web presence, right up there with Landing Page Optimization, User Interface (UI), good design and good, dynamic content and everything else. The danger we have found in our consulting projects however, is too much emphasis on SEO efforts. A business or marketing department spends too much time fretting over where they are on the search results page.

This leads to some dangerous marketing mistakes that may result in high results, but poor conversions and websites that are optimized for spiders and computers, not for the paying customer. The most critical thing a marketer must remember is that people pay, machines don’t. The other little element we forget about is that the algorithms for search engines are always evolving. It is one of the key elements that Tier 1 search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN compete on. It’s like keeping up with the Jones’. You may invest massive dollars and man-hours on SEO work and retain high cost SEO experts and inside of a couple months you’ve got a “Page Rank” of 6 and your popping up as #1 or #2 on multiple terms and keywords. Great, a collective sigh of relief in the Marketing Department and the CMO touts the Page Rank 6 number at the executive meeting smug and happy. Next day, Google changes its system. Your rank drops to 3 and the CEO calls and says “you told me our rank was 6 and today it’s 3 and we’re not even showing up on the first page of results…” uh oh.

The rules are always changing. Even very good SEO companies, and there are some excellent SEO companies, can’t always keep up. So the lesson here is, yes, SEO is important, but paying customers are more important. Focus on (as Google always says, rightly so) your content being relevant to the prospect. Focus on the needs and wants of the customer, and don’t buy-in to the often overinflated claims of the SEO companies. If your content is relevant, your UI good and your product good, SEO is just part of the mix.