Social Media’s Dark Horse
In two seconds, Evan Tipton can tell you what is the best marketing platform for adventure park operators. TripAdvisor and Facebook are important, he says, but the holy grail of marketing is Google+.
“Who would you rather talk to,” Tipton asks,” 5,000 Facebook fans, or Google?”
Scott Chreist, president and CEO of Adventura Aerial Adventure Park, agrees with him. “At the end of the day, everything that I’m doing with marketing is all tied to SEO,” Chreist says. And Google is the 800-pound gorilla of SEO.
When it comes to Google+ and SEO, marketing consultants are often guilty of two key failings:
- Not clearly defining SEO, or search engine optimization
- Proclaiming that a Google+ page increases SEO, without telling you how to measure this for yourself
Let’s correct both of those, shall we?
SEO Stripped to the Bone
We’ll start by simplifying SEO. We know that SEO is paramount to good online marketing. We know that a website with good SEO will rank higher in Google’s search results than one with poor SEO. But the essence of SEO is far less complicated than either of these facts.
SEO is about one thing: trust. Google’s job as a search engine is to show you trustworthy results. That’s why people use it.
As a business, your aim is to come out on top of relevant searches. But how?
Getting to the top of Google’s rankings is a game, a game in which Google is both coach and referee. Whoever plays by the rules gets the top search results, while the rest of us watch from the bleachers.
