Pyramid strategy on the web, or well balanced strategy

Remember, as a child, your mother constantly made you eat soup? It is unlikely that you knew that it gives you just fantastic advice on how to build a strategy on the Internet. Nowadays, all sorts of twitter, facebook, forums, blogs and much more is a great temptation to skip the first course and be carried away by the incredibly tempting dessert of social networks and SEO tricks.

Enterprises of all sizes and colors of leather climb into social networks, while not exerting at least an equal amount of effort to form a solid foundation from a user-friendly interface and high-quality content (content).
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To make a website that will be useful for visitors and will be able to respond to their needs, we just need to build a solid foundation of informative content, easy navigation and good SEO techniques.

With this all understanding, let's take a look at what I call the “strategy pyramid on the web.”

Pyramid of web strategy

1. Filling

Let's start at the bottom of the pyramid and move upwards gradually. The expression “information rules the world” is certainly a cliche, but for one reason this is true. You may have attractive ads, most followers on Twitter and even the best design, but none of this can bring you visitors and development if your site does not contain what these same visitors are looking for.

Quality filling is the fuel that will move and give meaning to all other efforts in the development of the site. After all, why would someone tweet about your site or share your link if you simply do not have anything worthwhile?

The only best way to achieve something worthwhile is to start with filling. If it is valuable, interesting and written for your users - be calm - you have created for yourself an excellent foundation for further work.

And here are a few more thoughts before we go further:

• Is the content of your site understandable by most visitors or are you using specific slang?
• Are the texts written specifically for the site in concise and digestible sentences or is it recycled material taken from a corporate booklet?
• If you are a blogger, do your notes reflect a point of view worthy of discussion and at least one retweet?

Creating high-quality content for the site is a difficult question, and if you want to read more about this topic, you can read about it in the Content Strategy section (at sixrevisions.com)

2. Convenience / Design

If your visitors cannot find what they are looking for, it will not make any difference that you have filled your site with interesting material. Difficult navigation, text sticking , distracting graphics and animation, as well as a wide range of other design mistakes can destroy all your hopes and turn a visitor into a buyer, and a follower into a crazy fan.

More recently, a full-scale usability testing could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now there are many other ways to find out users' opinions about the design and interface of your site.

The easiest option is testing on your employees or family using paper mockups or frames. Can they handle the most common tasks? Are they oriented in your navigation?

The simplest research lab includes a tool like Adobe Connect to capture user movements on the screen, record sound comments and facial expressions. All this later can be reviewed and analyzed.

Survey services such as Zoomerang or Survey Monkey along with screenshots can be a quick way to gather the right information from the audience.

Usabilla- like tools will help you get more specific feedback by combining surveys and heat maps.

Those of you who are a veteran of usability testing will agree that none of the proposed methods compare with solid testing / testing under laboratory conditions. However, my opinion is that the lack of a budget is not a reason to ignore this important step.

Some of the simplest means and thought-out questions are much better than the absence of them. Attention to this step will put you ahead of many competitors.

3. SEO

For some of you, it probably came as a surprise that SEO is not the underlying point of the pyramid. Well, let me explain: if the content of your site is well written and aimed at satisfying the demands of your users, you have already made significant progress towards effective SEO.

Too many times people try to find the secret of how to raise their rankings (TCI, PR) in search engines, but they never spend time to improve the content of their site. One of the real secrets of SEO is to create a good database with relevant content requests. Again, let's look at a few self-test questions:

• Do you use in the text the keywords for which users search for you? There are many tools to help you, including Google Insights , Wordtracker and others.
• Do your headlines in the text (H1, H2, H3) contain keywords?
• Do the page headings contain keywords and do these headings reflect the actual content of the pages?

Is your website created to satisfy visitors, or are you trying to appeal only to search engines? Hope the first one.

4. Social networks

Finally, about pleasant! Now that you have had to go through the creation of a solid foundation of informative content, user-friendly interface and SEO, we are ready to dive into social networks.

I assume that everyone who reads these lines already knows sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. And maybe you already have some experience using tools to optimize your efforts in the field of social networks (Radian6, ScoutLabs, HootSuite , etc.)

At the same time, the most important point is the following - have a long-term strategy for social networks .

Too many companies and ordinary people have opened their page on Facebook and are trying to do something without having a target audience, clear intentions and clearly defined goals.

Do you have a well-defined strategy for social networks? Here are a few points to help you:

• If you represent a company and one of the employees is assigned to monitor social networks, then this is his main occupation or does he do it when he has a spare time?
• Does your company use a PR or advertising agency for social networks? Using this type of external service is usually great for the initial launch and ongoing campaigns, but what will happen in two years? And after four?
• Who answers your clients' questions on Twitter, Facebook and forums? Does it stand the test of time and does it meet customer expectations? Moreover, is it profitable?

5. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Now that we have formed our strategy, based on good content, user-friendly interface, SEO and social networks, let's spend some time PPC. Depending on the needs of your business, pay-per-click advertising can play quite an important role. In most typical cases, however, it will be best for you to take care of the other elements before using PPC. Look at this as follows. Why do you spend money to attract visitors to a site that is not good enough to give a high-quality return from each attracted visitor?

Few final thoughts

Can this pyramid vary slightly depending on your specific needs? Surely. If you are a small / medium business selling a product for a small niche in the market, then SEO and PPC may be more important to you. If you are a blogger, social media can be a vital part of your strategy. This pyramid is not rigid, but the basic idea remains the same, regardless of your goals: take care of the main thing and do not let the seductive piece of “dessert” divert your attention until you have taken care of the main thing. Your users (and maybe your wallet) will thank you for it.