In talking to my client I explained what makes me different is my ability to think like a prospect.  I am not encumbered by the curse of knowledge that my clients seem to have when it comes to their business.  Many of my clients have forgotten what it’s like to not know that their product or service exists.  To deal with this I have use a process called Symptomeering.

Symptomeering (sym-to-meer-ing) is the process of identifying symptom based keywords that your target audience uses to explain the pain they are experiencing.  These symptom based keywords are then aligned with your offering in order to drive actionable traffic to your website.

The process looks like this:

Symptomeering Flow Diagram

If you understand nothing about SEO you should come to understand this – SEO cannot create demand. The best you can hope for is that you get found in the places that people are already going. This can be a search engine or the search tool in a social media site. Search only helps you find people that are already searching. That’s one of the great things about search marketing. You are marketing to people that are predisposed to your message.

I’ve never liked describing myself as a search consultant. It is certainly what I do and it is what my prospective clients understand but I do more than that. The work I do to help a site get found in a search engine can and will help drive traffic that wasn’t necessarily participating in a search. I might get my client mentioned in an article that drives visits from people there were not looking to solve a problem. You can’t get the kind of traffic by simply stuffing keywords into content that has already been produced.

In order to maximize the return when you hire a search consultant you need to engage the consultant before you build your site or even before you think of your website strategy.   Your search strategy should be the foundation of your website not the window dressing.

Visitors that use a search engine to find your site are actively looking for something. Your site will be worth more to those visitors if you actually describe what they are looking for using the same keywords they selected to find your site in the first place.

The following diagrams demonstrate the relationship between increased traffic and good keyword selection.

Here is another way to express this idea:

Nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole.