SEO: Operational Effectiveness Is Not A Strategy

The title is derived from Michael Porter’s famous argument in his Harvard Business Review 1996 article “What Is Strategy?”

Porter wrote “Operational Effectiveness is not a strategy….Operational effectiveness (OE) means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. Operational effectiveness includes but is not limited to efficiency.”

Operational effectiveness is necessary but not sufficient. Both operational effectiveness and strategy are critical to achieving superior performance, which is, after all, the primary goal of any business.

Consider a car traveling from point A to point B. Every time we travel, we ensure that the car’s gas, fuel, air, dashboards, and so on are in good working condition. These steps are part of operational effectiveness. When we start setting the destination in our navigation app, pressing the gas, and move forward, we start operating our strategy. The strategy is deciding where to go and which route to take when to apply gas and brakes when to turn left and right.

The strategies are our backup plans in case there is a construction project or other impediment along the path we’ve chosen. The shortest route does not guarantee a meaningful or effective journey; This is why determining “where not to go”, “what to avoid”, or Porter’s words, “what not to do” can also be a strategy.

We periodically glance and check the status of our vehicle as it moves forward to ensure that resources are operational and sustainable. We need to make sure we running at a reasonable speed, and have enough gas, water, and manpower to keep going.

We need operational effectiveness to get started and move forward, as well as strategy to figure out where we’re going and what to do when things go wrong. These two are critical in maximizing our resources and increasing our ability to play and compete in the business game for an extended period of time.

Operational effectiveness in SEO can be achieved by optimizing the following:

• Content. This is your vehicle’s fuel. Make sure you have enough gas to start moving. Always match your content to the user’s intent.
• Title tags / metadescripton. Many SEO practitioners do not include this as part of their routine because they hope that Google writes or rewrites them. If you want more control over your title and meta description tags, include these details on individual pages. Hope is not a viable strategy.
• Image alt-text values. The search engine has enormous power in identifying objects in images, but chances are you have an audience with special needs for better accessibility. Don’t ignore this if you want to give them a better reading experience.
• Canonical tags. One of the most severe issues in search engines today is the enormous amount of duplicate pages on the internet. Implementing this will help search engines identify which of them is original.
• Robots.txt / sitemap. This will assist search engines in determining which pages you want or do not want to be included in their database.
• Schema Implementation. Will your website still appear in SERPs if you don’t implement this? Technically, yes, but if you want to play a long game with Google’s ever-changing algorithm, you need to help them understand your page better. One way to do this is by incorporating structured markup language into your pages.
• Mobile Friendly Layout / Page speed. How would you like to welcome your mobile users? You don’t want them to wait longer than 5 seconds, do you?
• Link sharing view. How do you want your page to appear when it is shared on various social media platforms?
• Analytics setup. This is the dashboard of your vehicle. You will need this to gauge if you are adding value to your audience and aligning it with your business goals.

Strategy

Strategy is addressing the gaps: problem, opportunity, and threats. Strategy is not a plan. It means going outside an organization’s comfort zone. There’s a difference between planning and strategy.

• In planning, you imagine yourself as the audience or customer, whereas in strategy, the actual customers are the customers. There’s no certainty about how they will respond to our actions.
• In planning, we are limited with the knowledge we have and sometimes expect a positive result, whereas, in strategy, we are considering a world of opportunities and possibilities. Our actions could work in our favor or against us.
• In planning, we see positive results as a result of our own efforts, whereas in the strategy we credit other external forces that complement our efforts.
• In planning, we concentrate on our strengths, whereas in strategy, we expose our weaknesses and then seek an advantageous position. A strategy provides an answer to the question, “What will you do with your strengths to leverage your weaknesses?”
• In planning, we concentrate on opportunities, whereas in strategy, we respond to threats and then pursue competitive positions. Strategy answers the question of “what will you do differently from or better than others”.

Why do leaders often do so much planning? because planning is reassuring. The process is comforting, working on familiar things, things that we can control.

We can’t control everything in strategy, and we can’t guarantee the outcome, but we can use various theories, cite the work of other experts and use data to make decisions. We must clearly articulate the logic of our strategy, establish our own facts, and demonstrate its effectiveness. We must ask ourselves, “What must be true about our current process, the industry, competitors, and customers for this strategy to work?” By then, we will be able to confidently say, “this is what we want to happen, what we believe will happen, and what will give us a competitive advantage.”

• Strategy is not just about ranking first in SERPs for arbitrary keywords, but ranking on the keywords that drive traffic to your websites.
• Strategy is not just about increasing or gaining traffic from random visitors, but about acquiring targeted visitors who can gain value to our website content.
• Strategy is not just about acquiring snippets or looking good at SERP, but it is about fulfilling the visitor’s intentions using SERP snippets.
• Strategy is not just about creating content to gain visitors’ time and money up front; rather, it is about creating content that meets their current and future needs. It is all about developing relationships with both new and existing audiences.

A strategy can never be completed. It is a lengthy process of monitoring and adjusting. It’s a journey of repetition and refinement. Strategy and operational effectiveness are related but not the same. One cannot exist without the other. Improving operational effectiveness is necessary, but it is not a strategy.