“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yes, yes – this famous saying is apparently a misquotation of Emerson, but the message is still (unfortunately) the same: if you build it, they will come.  If your product is good enough, it will sell, and sell in large quantities.  And many a would-be entrepreneur has wasted all their time and money assuming this to be true.  Of course, as any marketer worth their salt knows, this is ridiculous.  It doesn’t matter how good your product is if nobody knows about it.

Taking the Better Mousetrap to the World

I know a marketer who took a job at this great startup several years back.  They had this awesome new way to purify water.  It was cheaper, didn’t use chemicals, and could basically offer clean, safe water to a village or small town anywhere in the world so long as it had reliable access to electricity and salt.  But here’s the problem: the entire company was made up of engineers with the Emersonian mindset that if the product was good enough, you wouldn’t have to sell it.  The world would beat a path to your door.

Unfortunately, the world didn’t beat a path to their door, and their primary investor was understandably beginning to get antsy.  Being the only one in the company who truly understood that their awesome product would never leave the warehouse if buyers never knew it was there, the marketer hit the road.  She visited every continent and met with local politicians and municipal leaders in countries from Japan and the UAE to Honduras, getting the word out.  She took the product to the world.  And, slowly, the world learned about this awesome product, and slowly they began to moved towards the company’s door.

What This Means Online

While most organizations get the fatal flaw in Emerson’s quote, the online space seems to be the one stubborn holdout.  Part of this is the result of snake-oil “SEO’s” who think Search Engine Optimization is all about gaming the system, tricking Google, etc.  In response, Google and the other major search engines (who have gotten quite good) respond with the generic advice, “don’t worry about SEO, just build great content,” and the rankings will take care of themselves.”  This is better advice than listening to the “black hat” guys, but it falls short because it assumes that the major search engines will rank your site highly simply because you have great content.  As the old question goes: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If only a few people know about your content (the tree falling), then the answer – online, anyway – is no, it doesn’t make a sound.

This isn’t the place to go into what makes a site rank online, but suffice to say it looks a lot closer to this:

than this oversimplified Emersonian equation:

At SMX-West a couple weeks ago, a panel of some of the best SEOs in the country were asked how often a writer should post in order to rank well.  The consensus?  It doesn’t matter how often you post if nobody’s reading it.  The bottom line is this: by all means, make sure your site has something unique to say, that you’ve got a product that’s more than just a commodity.  But just having something good to say or offer is only part of the equation.  It will take some good old-fashioned marketing (of the AIDAS sort) AND some basic SEO to get your site to rank, particularly if you’re in a competitive market.

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This guest post is courtesy of a good friend and true search marketing wiz Frank Barnett. Frank Barnett is an internet marketer with an unhealthy obsession with conversion rate, one of many ticks he’s developed doing PPC and SEO for almost 10 years.  You can find out more about Frank on his blog at frankcbarnett.com, or follow him at twitter at @fbarnett.

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