Business Breakfast SEO

Yesterday morning I had the opportunity to present Smartacus to local area business folks at this month’s Tarrant County Business Breakfast. The experience taught me a few things about business networking, and those lessons surprisingly parallel SEO principles.

First, the presentation was supposed to be two minutes long. My first attempt looked good on paper, but clocked in a almost five minutes — not good! In an exercise reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings screenplays, I focused my approach around a core theme – a suggestion, actually, from the Smartacus CFO — that of educating folks about SEO. (Not a new theme for sure, as I’ve been doing SEO seminars for a few years now.) In this case, however, I’d explain SEO by showing it in action – without a net.

A core element of SEO is link building. Pointing out that links are the internet-equivalent of a business referral, and that business referrals are why most of the attendees are attendees, I challenged everyone to place a link to the TCBB website using the anchor text “business breakfast” to show how they can leverage their referrals to positive results. Before the breakfast, the site ranked within the top 20 on Google/Bing/Yahoo but with room for improvement.

There were about 85 or so attendees at the breakfast, making it the largest crowd I’d ever addressed (if you don’t count cheering at baseball games). I did manage to hone my speech to two minutes, and it went pretty well. Funny, though, that the other seven presenters took anywhere from 3 minutes to over 6 minutes.

So what did I learn from this exercise?

• Focus your efforts — As I mentioned above, I had to focus what I talked about to get under two minutes. Focusing on my message also eliminated distractions from my speech, making the core message more effective. In SEO, this is the same approach for optimizing pages. Focusing on 2-3 keywords per page lets you organize your message for that page totally around those keywords, and minimizes distractions that could blunt your call to action. It also helps the search engines funnel visitors interested in those keywords to the precise page best focused on their needs.
• Authority matters — There was another web guy at the breakfast who walked around networking after the event was over. I didn’t speak with him, but I know he does some SEO too. Here’s the thing, though – even if we were saying exactly the same thing, the fact that I spoke at the podium meant that my words carried more authority. For SEO, authority is a key consideration for link building. Like in business networking, links from a perceived authority simply carry more weight – both with visitors and with search engines.
• Don’t let boundaries make you crazy — I stressed about staying within the two minute time limit, only to find that the limit was more of a suggestion. The time I spent honing the message was useful, but the time I spent tweaking words and phrases probably didn’t contribute much to the overall impact of the speech. In our SEO efforts, stressing over individual link requests and subtle content variations is often similarly misplaced. Spending a bit less time on the little stuff lets you spend more time on the bigger stuff (or at least on cranking out a couple more posts or links or whatever.)
• Attention is finite — While awaiting my turn, I noticed many attendees chatting to each other or reading through materials while the speakers blazed past their two minute marks. While I was certainly occupied with not screwing up my own speech, I didn’t see that so much during my turn. The conclusion I drew was that the crowd was willing to listen to me but not to push it. For your SEO efforts, the same holds true. Don’t take valuable information from one page and spread it out over many, just to “force” more engagement by your visitors or optimize more pages. Don’t make visitors work too hard to find what they need, because (unlike the breakfast attendees) they have no problem with walking out on your site.

I enjoyed my experience with the business breakfast, and am interested to see how the SEO experiment works out. More later!