MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

John Wooden, famous basketball coach at UCLA, is the inspiration behind Matt McGee’s SEO Success Pyramid. Wooden created the Pyramid of Success to inspire his basketball players. He didn’t speak about the act of winning, but focused instead on the process it would take to become a winning team. McGee follows a similar route in that instead of talking rankings, his pyramid discusses the process “of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers”.

Each step in the pyramid is explained by McGee and its value or contribution is also clearly indicated. The feedback he has received on his take on the elements that are most important and influential in the SEO process has been very positive. His readers have come back with mostly good things to say and with lots of praise for his work on the pyramid’s structure. I read two instances where readers dubbed his pyramid ‘the holy grail’ of the SEO industry’s process diagrams. It is quite an achievement to have those words said about your work, and I’m sure McGee is enjoying every bit of praise after the hard work and thought that was put into the pyramid.

McGee’s SEO Success Pyramid lays the foundations of the SEO process with commitment, planning, product/service, education and patience. The next level consists of design/usability, keyword research, analytics and tools. The vital components that bulk up the success of the project are crawlability, content and links. It is almost guaranteed that no optimisation venture will succeed without this level, as these are some of the most important bricks in the building of a successful SEO pyramid. The second last level consists of social/local findability and reputation management. At the very top of the pyramid is trust. The online community and word of mouth will assist you along most of this journey.

The pyramid that McGee has put together is full of valuable information and guidelines that are vital to the SEO industry. He goes into some detail in his post explaining the different bricks that together lay the foundation of the success pyramid. Some critics have said that there are reasons for some of the bricks to be shifted into different positions. However, most agree that the current setup is better equipped to explain the process, and offers a superior view on how to successfully apply SEO to your site’s business plan. I believe the pyramid will prove to be a great reference to assist clients in gaining a better understanding of the process involved in making their sites search engine compliant.

Improvements will surely be made over time, as new lessons are learnt and slight tweaks are made to adapt to future developments. But for now this version is a rather clear and accurate reflection of the SEO process, which we can follow and hopefully be inspired by. As Wooden once said, “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable”.