AdWords-Informed SEO

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach SEO mentally, and thus far, I’m pretty much equating it with my experience with keyword-based cpc advertising.

When I’m working in AdWords doing SEM, the mantra I’ve come to revere has been “think like the customer.” If you can learn how to put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for your product/service/information, selecting the proper keywords to bid on and writing the proper ad copy comes a lot more naturally, and the ads generally perform much better.

Thinking like the customer takes a little work, however. You need to identify the demographics of the individuals that are interested in your product/service/information (PSI from now on, for your sake and mine). Are you trying to sell to teens? The elderly? Men? Women? The type of person you’re advertising to matters, particularly when it comes to the type of copy you’re going to write.

Once you have a basic understanding of who your customer is, you can then think about the potential search terms your customers are going to use to find your PSI (stuff, from now on. PSI is a little lame). If your product has fairly good brand recognition, then name-type terms are going to be very valuable. On the other hand, if your product is new, or you are trying to create a niche, you’ll do a lot better selecting descriptive keywords that detail problems that your stuff solves or things that your stuff improves. For example, if you created a tool that makes your internet faster (pretending that no such tool exists) then you would bid on terms like “speed internet up” or “faster internet.”

Generally, the most valuable terms will have the most competition, which means higher bids. Thus, tools like the Overture Bid Tool are invaluable, because they let you see the top bids for the keyword you select. This high-bid, high-value rule isn’t always true, however, so I’ve learned not to be shy about putting keywords up that have no bidding whatsoever. You never know if there is virgin keyword territory that is yet untapped.

Now on to my point. It seems that SEO is much the same way. You figure out who your page is meant for. You figure out what keywords are going to draw those people in. Is your service revolutionary, and therefore niche-creating? Or is it about something more established, like insurance? Using these keywords, you then create content geared towards your target demographic (your site should look very different depending on whether it’s meant for senior citizen shuffleboard players or teenagers looking for snowboard tricks).

You should also prioritize which keywords are the most relevant to your site, and because those are the keywords that are most likely to have a lot of competition, you will have to work harder on link building using those keywords. Consider your time linkbuilding to be like money in keyword bidding. Generally, the better keywords cost more. Hey, time is money, right?

I’m still getting the details sorted out, but this is the best way I can make sense of things using my previous experience. Any other ideas that I might be missing?