Online Marketing is basically the adaptation of traditional marketing practices to the online media channel (i.e, the Web). As with any new communication channel there is a maturity curve through which businesses have to experiment and figure out how to get the best value for the time and money they invest in growing their presence in that space. But at the end of the day, beyond creating awareness and growing share of voice, organizations need to build trust.

I have come across Matt McGee’s simple and brilliant SEO Success Pyramid which was inspired by coach John Wooden Pyramid of Success.

Building from the bottom up, McGee illustrates how to build online trust.

go to Matt McGee’s website to view a bigger version

From the bottom up, McGee recommends to focus on the following steps.

Note: I took the liberty (with Matt’s kind consent) of changing the descriptions you can find on his website for the purpose of clarifying some concepts with my own words.

Commitment: It is all about people and team effort. Organizations and marketers must work hand in hand and be passionate about what they want to achieve in order to be successful.

Planning: Behind any success story is a plan with clearly set goals, a range of tactics and strategies, requirements for people and resources as well as a project map to successfully reach the set objectives on target and on time.

Product/Service: You need to provide a product or service that people actually want and in order to build a great brand you need to provide quality to sustain your success.

Education/Information: The more you know about what it is you are trying to achieve and about the different available strategies, the more informed decisions you will be able to make.

There are many improvised “online marketing experts” and being able to discern professionals from frauds will save you a lot of trouble and money.

Patience: The journey towards success is a process. As any process, it takes time to implement, measure, adjust and fine tune to find the formula that works for your business. Rome wasn’t built overnight!

Design & Usability: Usability guru Steve Krug has a book called “Don’t make me think” when it comes to designing websites. A great seamless user experience and clean and professional design is the way to success and higher conversion rates.

Keyword Research: This is specific to the online world. People find you through search engines (such as Google or Yahoo) by typing keywords. Knowing what keywords people use is critical to being present in the result pages of search engines. These keywords and their relevancy (or performance) become even more critical when you start paying for them (Pay Per Click)

Analytics: Measuring what people do on your website will enable you to learn from their behaviour and validate the performance of your online strategy. And with all the advanced tools now available, you can easily measure your success online.

Tools: Analytics, Competitive Keyword Search, Meta Tag Generators, Rank checking, PPC campaigns, etc. are some of the tools that will help you implement, measure and analyse your online marketing strategy.

Crawlability: Search engine websites “crawl websites” with “spiders” in order to analyze the content of pages and the specific code (Meta Tags) that are setup for them to read and interpret. Make sure that your website has been optimized for search engines (hence the coined science of SEO – Search Engine Optimization).

Content: This is what online visitors come for: information on your products or services, how to contact you, Frequently Asked Questions, your organization’s history, your Terms and Conditions, what you have to say on your Blog, etc.

I would add “Services” to McGee’s block as visitors also use services to: share photos/videos/stories, buy products & services, find jobs/homes/cars/soulmates/news.

Links: Search engine websites give you a better “ranking” in the result pages if your website is well linked to. This means that the more other websites link to you, the more traffic you’re potentially going to receive and the more relevant your website will appear to Search Engines. As a consequence it is important to link into various strategies to have these other websites link to you. Also, the more important the websites are that link to you, the higher the ranking.

Social/Local Findability: People will look for you on popular social websites (such as Facebook and YouTube) and on most used online directories (such as Yahoo, Google Maps, YellowPages or 411).

Depending on your products and services, if you’re B2B or B2C and the strategy behind your brand, it might not be worth investing a lot of energy but always keep in mind how people find you.

Reputation Management: With the proliferation of Blogs and social websites that enable customers to leave reviews, you’ll want to keep an eye on what people (customers, former employees, fans, etc.) are saying about your brand. The best strategy is usually to enable them to express themselves on your own website and address their complaints directly (if they happen to have any) and show them that you care.

Trust: This is the ultimate goal. Trust creates loyalty. Loyalty creates recurrent business. It is way more expensive to gain a new customer than to keep one. Anything you could do to create and renew trust, whether in the real world or online, is the best investment you can make for your brand.

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