Advanced SEO: The 4-step campaign process

1. Target your query
2. Plan your campaign
3. Assemble the troops
4. Charge ‘em and they scatter!

Advanced search engine optimization begins and ends in your sleep. You wake up with a goal in mind and you go to sleep secure in the knowledge that you have set your forces into motion to achieve that goal.

It’s that simple.

Target your query

You want to be able to identify a cultivatable keyword quickly. Maybe the idea comes to you while you’re reading a news story. Maybe you watch a television show or movie and see something that makes you think, “I wonder what is on the Web about that?”

A keyword is cultivatable if you look at the search engine results page and say to yourself, “This will be like taking candy from a baby.” That doesn’t mean it will be easy. It just means that your professional plan and resources are up to the task of walking up to the 500-pound baby and plucking its candy away without a fight.

Advanced search engine optimization tends to go where no SEO has gone before, boldly optimizing content that no one else has seen a need to optimize. If you’re lucky, you get to create the content yourself. If you take on a client in industry X that has been done to death, can you find a set of traffic-laden keywords that have not been turned into hyperoptimized mush through constant link-building? Often you can if you stay on top of trends (and advanced search optimizers are always looking for trends).

Trends speak an entirely different language from the baby talk of “link building” and “link baiting”. Trends tell you where the next resource sites will pop up, where people will turn next to satisfy their cravings for Web feed, and what has been overlooked by the popular keyword-chasing crowd of spammers and AdWords managers.

Plan your campaign

You are the Johnny Appleseed of the Web, planting good content and giving it time to grow into something large and bountiful. You pass over desert Webscapes and leave forests of useful information in your path. You don’t look for markets to invade, you look for ways to build and shape new markets.

You manage query spaces, not Web sites. Web sites are components in query spaces. So are advertising campaigns. So are referential links on other Web sites. Your link copy should tell people a story, drawing them in deeper to find out more.

You have to quickly decide how large your Web site will be and what you will do with it. Calls to action are not the priority. Rather, magnets for attention have to be your focus. You’ve mastered calls to action at the Journeyman level of SEO. Here in your most professional capacity you need to sculpt a Web site that artfully provides searchers with just the information they want. You may be able to do that in 5 pages or in 500 pages. It doesn’t really matter as your skills are up to the task.

You have to quickly decide where you will seed your starter links. You don’t just do blogs and directories. You don’t rely on free article distribution and forum posts. You don’t think in terms of social media. You know where your links will achieve high visibility with a good chance of conversion.

You need to know what kind of copy is called for and how you’ll produce it. You need to know how that copy will be presented to the legions of hungry visitors come to gobble up your goods. You need to know how your copy will look on search results pages. You need to know how your copy will look compared to whatever other sites appear in your SERPs.

Assemble the troops

What if you launched a search optimization campaign without your favorite SEO tools? How would you get the job done? Actually, you’ll save time if you depend less on tools and more on your home-grown resources. You need a spreadsheet (but any old blank document will do), a Web browser (sans toolbars and plugins), and a keyword reporting tool.

Your first order of business is to assemble the “search visitor model”. This is your front line solder. The search visitor model doesn’t know anything about your Web site, doesn’t use SEO tools, and may be using keywords you don’t think of. The search visitor model tells you what you need to know, what you need to convey.

Next, you assemble your “business operator model”. This is where you determine ROIs, marketing resources, and performance metrics. You have to be ready to measure success when the site goes live so that you don’t lose any time.

Next, you assemble your “search optimizer model”. This is were you figure out what the opposition will see, what room you’ll leave them in the search results (the more open and generous you are, the less competitive the query becomes for you), and how you plan to “one up” the competition when they show up. That’s right, an advanced SEO always has a backup plan. You never play your last card until you find another card to replace it.

Finally, you assemble your “site management model”. Where will you host it, how much will the hosting cost, which features will the site include, how will those features be included, and all the basic mundane stuff? You need to know how you’re going to bring the Web site to the war because the war won’t come looking for the site. You want a lot of flexibility so you don’t spend your time watching AJAX and Flash screens update.

Charge ‘em and they scatter

Anyone who knows their J.R.R. Tolkien history knows he loved to drive his family around the countryside in their car and, when coming to an intersection where another vehicle approached at about the same distance, he would hit the gas and yell, “Charge ‘em and they scatter!”

It’s an old cavalry creed. You’re most effective when you charge and seize ground. Having to defend turf is not quite as easy unless you are very well entrenched. So an advanced SEO takes advantage of the element of surprise and yells out, “The market is over HERE!” instead of waiting for someone else to do it.

If you’re not first into the fray, don’t panic. Odds are very much still in your favor as most people are not advanced SEOs. You can take candy away from large babies if they don’t actively monitor queries. A lot of made-for-advertising sites and parked domains, for example, sit in a swathe of uncherished queries that can be developed for search marketing.

Which is not to say you should expect to find high traffic queries dominated by parked domains. Rather, you have to put some effort into generating interest in those particular queries you select. If you only chase high-volume queries, you’ll never enjoy the full potential of being an advanced SEO.

The beauty of advanced search engine optimization is that it can usually be executed in four steps.