By John M Tate

If you are using a marketing plan template or software to create your plan, one of the best things you can do is to create a foundation for and include consistent activities related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization by definition (Wikipedia) is: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. The goal is to be displayed as highly as possible on the first page of search results in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing for search phrases that involve your business service or product.

There is a misconception about what SEO means for a business… It is NOT about ranking highly for your company name (unless your company name exactly matches your service).

Let’s look at an example of this. Let’s say a company name is Giant Demolition, Inc. and their website address is giantdemolition.com. When somebody searches in the Google search bar for, giant demolition, then giantdemolition.com had BETTER come up first!

Getting ranked for the exact website name is the by-product of performing just a few easy tasks within the website and does not mean that your website is properly optimized! This is especially true for a.com domain (as opposed to .net, .org, .info, etc.).

Search engine optimization involves an action plan for ranking highly when people are searching for your type of product or service, not your exact company. Relatively, nobody is searching for your company name compared to the number of people searching for your type of product. Let’s look at a real example to illustrate the point.

Let’s take an example of a company that is a leader in its industry and spends millions of dollars in advertising every year.

Over 33,300 people type in Papa Johns into Google, per day. That is a whole lot of people searching for a company name, but let’s look at how many people search for the product type…

680,000 people per day type in the term pizza in Google.

So even for an industry leader that advertises a ton, they are searched for by name less than 5% of all searches for their product. Believe me that your small business is searched by name much less than 5% of all searches for your type of product.

But get this, it doesn’t matter!

You can capture the people that are searching for your type of product or service and direct them to your site. The best time to capture new visitors is when they are already on their computer searching for your exact product/service. Alternatively, a marketing campaign might involve a giant billboard with your website in huge writing, but it is very difficult for people to remember the website address exactly right, if they remember to even try to once they are in front of a computer. A much more immediate approach with less opportunity for error involves targeting them while they are looking for your product online.

Once you then attain a high ranking through Search Engine Optimization, then with just a little consistent effort on a weekly basis you can keep this ranking and it can pay you back repeatedly with new customers day after day for many years! That is the beauty of SEO, since the cost of this maintenance is just a fraction of the cost of how much the advertising would cost to get the same amount of paid traffic to your site.

In our last example, do you know how much traffic the #1 search result for pizza gets? Well the top result is http://www.Dominos.com and it likely gets at least about 5,000 (~ 40% Google searches for the exact search for keyword pizza) visitors per day from the term pizza…for FREE. Alternatively, the #1 paid search result at the time of this writing for the exact search for pizza spends about $1.14 per click ( www.pizzahut.com ), so would need to spend $5,700 per day to get the same amount of traffic to their site!

That is the power of search engine optimization…

Free vs. $5,700/day.

So when it comes to selecting a marketing plan template, selecting one that includes Search Engine Optimization can make the difference in your marketing success.

John M. Tate is a Managing Director at Marketing Machine, LLC and an active contributor for http://www.SampleMarketingPlan.org

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