Is having great search engine ranking enough?

How often do you get those spam emails promising to get you top search engine rankings? I personally get a lot of them, most originating from an Indian SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company promising to get my website right at the top of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Obviously it's an automated email, since any bit of research on their part would give them a clue that we are already at the top of all the search engines for our target keywords, but that's besides the point. Even if our rankings were poor, some may wonder if 'getting up there' is the magic bullet to drive insane traffic to your website which hopefully translates to profits for your company. The answer to this question is pretty simple, the answer is No.

Huh? Really?

Yes, really. Getting to the top of the search engines in this day of social networks and instant information is just one part of the puzzle. Now of course 5-6 years ago, the tale was different. I recall an e-commerce store that I was involved with that made 100% of it's profits as a direct result of search engine, read: Google traffic. Well, as good ol' Bob Dylan said, the times are a changing, and top ranking in the engines do not have as profound of an impact as they did before. Does that mean having great search engine ranking is useless? Heck no! All it means is that SEO should just be an integral part of your overall web marketing strategy, not your only strategy.

Holistic Internet Marketing

So, at this point you may be wondering what the other pieces to the puzzle are if SEO isn't the only thing you need to do. The answer to this can be really convoluted, and I can easily go into a tirade of important sounding marketing or geek terms that will most certainly make your eyes glaze over and bore the heck out of you. Instead, I think I will keep it simple and highlight some of the more obvious things that you should be doing in addition to SEO.

1. Blogging - Maintain a well written blog for your website that contains fresh, helpful information that your users can benefit from. Educate your readers and I guarantee they will pay you back with their business.
2. Facebook Page - Start a Facebook page and synch some of your blogs, current news/events on it. Make sure to have your friends and or clients 'like' your page, or better yet, offer incentives for them to do so.
3. Newsletters - Reading this is proof that people still read email newsletters. Ok, I stole that from an ad on a bus-stop bench, but you get the idea... Like blogging, make your emails interesting with information that is worth reading for your users. Again, educate your readers instead of trying to sell to them.
4. Linked In - Create a profile on linkedin.com and make connections with others in your industry. I find this is a pretty good avenue of leads for people who provide business to business service.
5. Localized deal sites - Try using localized 'deal of the day' services like Groupon.com or LivingSocial.com. They take a hefty commission, but you can easily get an influx of 1000 new sales in one day. Although these services are targeting businesses who sell products, I have seen some pretty interesting deals for service based companies like hairstylists and spas as well.
    

The good old days of relying solely on Google to drive traffic to your site is gone. While search engine optimization is important, we need to have a diversified web-marketing plan to be truly successful in this age of the web.