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Seach engine results and SEO are important to most marketing, but not always. |
I’m involved with a viral marketing campaign right now for ObamaWatches.com, an effort to help Barack Obama get elected President of the United States. During the process, others on the team keep asking how we can increase our search engine results.
My answer is always, “Who cares?”
When you’re putting together a viral effort, the first thing you have to stop worrying about is search engine results for one simple reason: if the viral works, SEO planning won’t matter because people will spread it on their own. And if the viral doesn’t work, even being first on a search isn’t going to help.
For example, who is going to search for “Obama Watches” unless they know about the viral effort? If the viral worked, the odds are that the person already has the link to the web site. As it is, a Google search already returns ObamaWatches.com as the #1 search result. And why wouldn’t it? The site is named the search term, and there really isn’t that much competition for those key words.
This campaign is designed to be shared primarily over the web, which means people will be forwarding the URL. The second concern was a literal Word of Mouth (WOM) effort, where people would physically be talking about it — and the success on that has more to do with the ease of remembering the domain name (ObamaWatches.com) than with being easy to find on a Google search.
So in the end, if we have to choose to spending some of our limited resources on a new targeting online effort, or in increasing our search engine results, there’s no question that SEO efforts will not even be considered.