Was Google Hacked?

Reviewing some SEO work for one of our companies this morning I was surprised to see that last night (according to Google) we grew from about 20,000 pages of content cached to over 3,780,000,000.  What was more alarming was Google now showed under the search result a little note that said “this sight may harm your computer”.  The site was listed as a spam site!  I started to fire off a string of emails to get the technical team working on the problem, tried calling the CEO and then I noticed something even more alarming.

Organic Search, Seriously?

A brilliant friend of mine and V-fluence (leading interactive public relations firm) commented there is nothing organic about search anymore. Interesting comment, and an accurate one.

With the explosive increase of web sites, blogs and anything else you can think of to throw on the Internet, becoming visible in search is far from organic or natural.  In fact an entire industry has developed focused just on improving search visibility.

SEO Strategy, the Basic Concept

Several blogs over the last year have highlighted strategies related to SEO and improving results.  What is interesting is that most of these are written from a technical point of view speaking to issues that are strategic in nature and have to do with much broader issues of marketing and consumer relevance.

The issues impacting the media landscape (media defined very broadly) are profound and most organizations appear to be framing the conversation about this evolution through their own historical frame of reference.  The future of media is not every advertising agency, PR firm, newspaper and TV station developing a “digital group” or an “interactive practice”.  The future – every organization is a media company – directly or in most cases indirectly through partnership (conversation for a later blog).

At the simplest conceptual level, organizations need to step back and without bias think about three things.  Who is their audience, what is relevant to their lives and how is my organization relevant to their lives.  OK,maybe one more – what is the narrative that will connect these people with my brand.  All of the technical vehicles can then be reviewed to determine the appropriate balance of marketing, the digital strategy and the development of media (content) for that niche’.

Focusing on the SEO issues in the context of purchasing ads more effectively is important, but ultimately should not be the core of a digital strategy.  Relevance is the driver and an issue focused approach – both to be addressed in a later blog.