Tactical SEO vs Strategic SEO

Great post, great tips, and one question:

Do you believe it maybe a strength to stay within the niche and be the best in it ... and still grow inside your niche.

It may be against your position of going beyond your niche ;)

"Program it in such a way, that it's easy to monetize it when the day for monetization comes."
I am guessing that you are thinking of strategies like writing helpful info on something, and then later offering
paid membership into an exclusive mentorship, or maybe, once newbies get the hang of something they have free instruction in, then offering an expanded lesson in the form of a $5 ebook.
Are these good examples? If not,
Can you give your viewers some general examples of what you mean?
Actually, now that I think about it, I guess this website is an excellent example.
There is the forum , for example.
People ask the tough questions that you and your visitors answer.
Then, there is the marvelously placed seo book offer, which, by the way, seems to appear before my eyes just as I am pondering the topic, as I scroll down.
I guess the key to all of it, is to make the "pitch" appear natural, unforced, and unoffensive just as you have done.
But mostly I would have to say, I think you are successful because of your generosity in giving of your self and what you know.
I think people reward that in the long.
By the way, Aaron, the offer still stands for a free vacation, just let me know.
(no strings, i just appreciate your insights)
Sue

I wanted to mention something you said in the first strategy you listed about breaking even wit advertising at first in order to indirectly benefit later.

I think a lot of people remain too focused on direct benefit and not enaging in something if it doesn't pay right now. Indirect benefits will often ultimately prove to have a much greater value for a business than many direct benefits.

A simple example would be giving something away for free. There's no revenue coming directly from giving something away, but the return in links and trust that can come can end up being worth far more than whatever went into giving that something away.

Wonderful post Aaron though it misses a bigger consideration of simply tactical optimization of a page for a keyword vs. strategic optimization of the entire site by instilling best practices in the rest of the organization.

Data based SEO tells a specific story and gives a specific direction for SEO implementation, rather than just saying implement H1 tags all over the place because thats what everyone else does. It lets you know what works, what doesnt work, what works for your competitors, etc (if you have the right data).

I agee with this statement, as we are still find the best way to find any usefull information for seo

Nice list, Aaron

I think SEO used to be this way all the way, when it was a part of SEM or overall marketing strategy.

Now that it is clear that SEO can't exist alone, it is just bound to be a part of something bigger. Like a tool you use everyday, but don't be obcessive on it.

The strategy I use is to build content for my own site and other websites to get links. It is not just article distribution, it is getting published on other websites by cooperating with other site owners. Pretty good so far. (In short, this strategy may be more familiar as exchanging content for links that drive targeted traffic, but it is much more than that).

Aaron,
Terrific post.

My experience is also that few people would think to go beyond the tactics mentioned, or even know how to do so, and I count myself in that group (although not for too much longer, thanks to you and others). Frankly, you could probably write a book based on this post. Oops, you already did :)

Copycat! I made a post about stragety vs tactics earlier this month on my blog. Just kidding, great stuff, although I was thinking strategic more along the lines of timeline.

Just as in warfare, you have to understand the tactical side to really achieve success strategically. This is why there are billions being poured into startups and stocks, while guys like Markus Frind rake in millions a year single-handedly (much in part thanks to those big spenders.)

Another great post Aaron.

"If the vertical should be easy to dominate, make your core brand name broad enough that if you later want to expand you can."

I cannot agree more with this. We have all been in this situation where we have been taken by surprise by a niche and in which the branding we chose in the beginning limits our expansion possibilities.

Refreshing read Aaron.

I see some of these patterns as well, since I am involved in coordinating all forms of marketing for our company. The SEO guy is bloodthirsty for links, the affiliate guy only wants leads, the top brass only wants growth. It's my job to make sure we're all getting max value from each opportunity.... so I'll be forwarding this to at least 5 people in my company :-)

Control content costs and make boatloads of average content. Build the authority of the site using exceptionally high quality content. Leverage that authority to profit from your boatloads of average content on that site. Segregate your high quality and high attention content from your lower value content, but after attention has passed ensure that the high quality content links trough to your lower quality content.

That is probably the hardest one to balance. I try to keep all my content on my sites for the visitor. It is the long term strategy. But as you say, content costs, measured in my time, are high. So the question you have to ask yourself is, how much average content is to much? At what point does it degrade the user experience?

I'll give a recent example. One of the blogs I read every day has always posted daily, if not more. Lately I get the feeling many of the posts are just filler without much meat. They keep tossing in gems often enough to keep me coming back but there really was a point where I almost dropped it. The % of fluff was getting to high to make it worth it.

Aaron great post. I think you hit the monitize part right on the head. For many people starting a new site it is hard to wait on putting up as etc.

I am trying an experiment with 2 sites to see the "linkworthyness"

So far you are 100% right more ads means less links. In the future I am going to hold off for 6 months.

Hi Jeremy
I think the issue is that if you have a channel people are paying attention to you can do other things if you want to introduce "large volumes of content" without introducing "noise" ... for example, some people might put the noise stuff on a part of their site powered by a different cms or off a different feed, while others might backdate their noise, etc. such that the average reader paying attention to their channel does not get the noise

Balancing it is a tough issue, though.

Could you give an example of

"Strategic:
Invest and reinvest. Make less upfront. Create passive income streams from properties that were designed around minimal customer service and growing into dominant self-reinforcing market positions."

What websites would you consider to have this property at the moment?

Well think in terms of verticals and think in terms of business models within those verticals.

My amount of required customer service does not drastically increase if I sell 20 ebooks instead of 2 or 3.

Then there are entire verticals where you can give the perception of adding lots of value without really requiring much customer interaction on any level at all. Those are beautiful, of course, but they are also typically wildly competitive.

As a general rule of thumb: the closer your product is to money the easier it is to make money without adding any real value. And if you sell the dream of making lots of money people will pay a lot for that dream even if their actual chances of doing well from it are quite low.

Aaron,

Very good idea with the backdate. I can easily see taking a site with a news section, say about something local, and taking 100 pages of out dated news and adding them backdated to when they really occured.

Hi Jeremy
Keep in mind that some people may view that as being inauthentic and some people might come here and give me shit for even suggesting it, but if you are results oriented it is almost an art form to maximize profits without adding too much noise to what you are doing.

But at the same time, as you grow and your core audience grow, does it make sense to feed lots of for beginner stuff to them? And if it does not then should you force yourself to be marginalized by an ever increasingly sophisticated audience? Or should you occasionally post some for beginner stuff, or post it more frequently but backdate it a bit?

There are lots of ways to accomplish the goal of hitting different market segments, but it is hard to keep having a profitable business model if you only post about what you are learning about at the moment...in most markets the people who teach and write for beginners are just assumed to be the topical experts even if their knowledge level is quite limited in nature.

And, in the business world at least, you are largely what others believe you to be.

I have a problem with my blog like, I want to add a code which will make each page of blog take different description meta tag, is it possible in blogger, please I need it, thanks in advance.

My SEO paradigm shift goal:

SEO shift from just following SEO tactics (implementing SEO from what we understand as industry SEO techniques), to strategic, data-based SEO.

Data based SEO tells a specific story and gives a specific direction for SEO implementation, rather than just saying implement H1 tags all over the place because thats what everyone else does. It lets you know what works, what doesnt work, what works for your competitors, etc (if you have the right data).

Heart your data.