With Will out of the office for a week or so, I was let out to attend a sales meeting. In the normal course of events Will does our sales meetings and I stay in the office looking after the troops.

At sales meetings Will likes to talk in terms of the following diagram, which he normally scribbles on a scrap of paper. I think it is quite a nice way of explaining the SEO process to non-SEO people.

The following diagram seemed to help in my meeting this morning, and given Will is out of the office and hasn't already written this blog post I thought I'd steal his diagram and take the credit ;-)

 

The aim of the diagram is to explain what we see as three factors that you need before you will rank in the search engines. The factors are closely related to each other, and if you are weak in any of the factors then you are unlikely to rank well in any of the search engines.

Technical Issues

The first key element to ranking well is to ensure that there aren't any technical barriers stopping the search engine spiders from reading and understanding your site. A large percentage of small businesses we see have some sort of an issue that is either stopping the site from ranking at all or at the very least is making it very hard work.

The issue with small businesses is that they just don't have the domain weight to make up for technical issues. Bigger businesses can get away with a lot more, but technical issues to a small business with very little trust render them practically invisible. I'm talking in terms of people who don't even rank for branded searches.

Landing pages, iframes, session IDs, text in images... I'm sure you all have your own horror stories to share.

Did you hear the one about the major UK retailer that had a robots.txt disallowing the search engines from every page of their website?

On-Page or Content Issues

If you don't talk in terms of things that people actually search for then you are going to struggle to rank well. Keyword research is often hard to sell to people that don't "get" it. We have found people who are price sensitive and try to get by without keyword research often fall into the nightmare client bucket. Keyword research gives you insights that you can't get any other way. Experience can often paper over these cracks, but if you can instill in people from an early stage the importance of knowing the best language to use on a website then your job becomes a whole lot easier.

Here we are not only talking in terms of keywords but the information architecture of your site. I'm going to use this opportunity to continue my campaign. I honestly believe that most SEO issues come as a result of a poor information architecture. Eric Enge over at Search Engine Land talks about how information architecture is crucial to SEO.

This is obviously related to technical issues. If the search engines can't spider your page or read your content then it doesn't matter what content you have on the site because it isn't going to help... Yes, Mr. Flash Website, I'm looking at you.

This relationship is the difference between having a website passing semantic information to the search engines and a website talking in the right language that has decided the best way to make something look like a header can't possibly be to use the header tags. One of the things I love about SEO is that the majority of suggestions given to improve "optimization" also improve your website to users. The last thing I want to do is to start the "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines" argument again, but I've found SEO done well often aligns users and search engines more than people admit.

Trust

Otherwise known as links...

What most non-SEO people don't realize is that links can help you to rank in the search engines *shock*. I still find it amazing how few people understand the web. I've spoken to numerous people writing regularly on blogs that haven't grasped the basic concepts of the internet. Obviously I live and breathe the web, but it still shocks me how little people understand about the search engines.

Many a time I'll talk in terms of SEO being like online PR, and what you need to do is to get people online talking about you. People grasp that, and then talk in terms on linking out to other people.

I know All That Already

Of course, this isn't the only way to sell SEO, and I'm by no means an expert at it. I have found the above a useful way to start a conversation with someone who doesn't grasp the work that is involved. Personally, I find a diagram (even an abstract one) helps to clarify things for me. None of this is advanced SEO, but often SEO is about doing the simple things right, and being able to communicate with your potential clients.

I'm sure you all have your own ways of explaining SEO to a potential client, so I'll open up the floor and get your input.