Skyrocket Your Revenue: Why SEO Should be the Main Component in Your Online Marketing Strategy
As the digital revolution charges into the future, businesses are strategizing ways to most effectively spend their advertising dollars. More specifically, they must decide how much budget to allocate to SEO among the many advertising options available to them. The ideal approach would be to build robust campaigns in all available channels, but this would be costly and difficult to execute. Consequently, businesses must focus on channel(s) best suited for their business needs. Of all online marketing channels, SEO can have the biggest impact with the best ROI.
Organic search marketing has the potential to make or break
your business, and there is raw potential for huge profits. Imagine gaining tens of thousands of new
visitors to your website overnight because you moved to the number one positing
for a high valued keyword. What would
that do to your bottom line? That
scenario is a possibility with SEO.
Furthermore, executing a well developed SEO campaign offers additional benefits beyond increased revenues. Search engine optimization helps you think about structuring your website in a way that promotes greater visibility and consistency in the search engines. It also improves user engagement statistics. Online marketing strategies that do not include SEO are missing a critical element to their online success.
In the following article, I will make the case for why SEO should be a major component of your online marketing strategy, wrapping up with some suggestions for choosing a quality practitioner.
Organic Search is the Preferred Channel for Shopping
There is much debate in the online marketing community about the effectiveness of natural search campaigns as compared to paid search, social media, email marketing and other channels. All these marketing channels have their pros, but, overall, natural search gives you the best bang for your buck. Below are a few statistics on the influence of natural search as compared to other online marketing channels.
The charts from a Hubspot survey, above, show how search engines are the preferred method searchers use to find information about products and services before they purchase. Social media, and blogs are also important resources, but natural search still remains the clear winner.
Not reflected in this study is how people interact with social media and blogs. Researching a product through social media really amounts to asking family and friends about a product or service. Social media itself does not offer a mechanism for in depth research, although it does facilitate communication between friends, family and other centers of influence.
Blogs tend to provide a more comprehensive mechanism for research. Typically, a blog has the hurdle of becoming a trusted source of information about a particular subject. Once a searcher has been won over by the blog contributors and trust is established, then the searcher will tend to visit that blog to find data for informing purchase decisions around a specific subject matter.
While social media and blogs are adequate channels for research, they are surpassed by natural search. Natural search provides a more complete mechanism for research. It typically incorporates results from social media and blogs, which makes it more inclusive. Consequently, it’s important to optimize your information for natural search. Because of its inclusive nature, it is now, and will remain the top choice for searchers looking to find useful information before making a purchase decision.
The Hubspot study, furthermore, demonstrates the dominance of organic search as a trusted source of information. The chart below shows that organic search far exceeds paid search in terms of trust. Organic search sources are therefore likely to have a greater impact on buyers’ purchase decisions than paid search. Though the impact of paid search is more immediate, with faster placement and feedback from searchers, buyers are more likely to produce conversions based on the advice of an organic source.
Additional Advantages of Search Engine Optimization
Along with being the preferred channel for purchases and research and offering greater opportunities for increased traffic, optimizing your webpages for natural search presents many additional advantages. First and foremost is improved organization and management of your online strategy and online content. Engaging in search engine optimization for your website forces you to look at your search marketing campaigns in a more structured way. To succeed, you must develop online marketing policies that govern every aspect of your natural search campaigns. These aspects include keyword administration and effective rank tracking and visibility tracking. Also included are conversion goals and the successful development, maintenance and decommissioning of content. The very nature of engaging in SEO encourages website owners to put their best foot forward when it comes to website presentation, function, and value. Furthermore, widespread practice of quality SEO ultimately helps organize WWW content in a global sense. The more websites that follow best practices for publishing content, the better the internet becomes.
Search engine optimization also compels website owners to more accurately track the performance of natural search. For years, many website owners have taken a willy-nilly approach to quantifying natural search results. It was exciting when things were going well, but when there was a drop in results, there were no benchmarks set up to understand the change. SEO requires a more precise approach to tracking. Site owners must look closely at what’s driving their organic traffic. They tend to notice the correlation of their content and keywords to the ranking of their webpages. Engagement statistics like bounce rate, time on site and pages per visits must also be considered. All of these metrics are important for becoming more prominent in natural search marketing. With more accurate tracking in place, marketing efforts for natural search can be better honed, leading to improved performance and increased ROI.
Choosing the Right SEO Company
Although there is major upside to implementing a robust SEO campaign, finding the right SEO company can be a challenge. The search engine optimization industry is not regulated, and, as a result, anybody can read a few articles online and then proclaim themselves an SEO expert. It happens all the time. The internet is littered with bad ideas and misinformation about SEO, which can make it difficult to know what to look for when hiring an SEO company or bringing someone on staff.
It is important to find a company that understands traditional marketing, or the process of creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers, clients and society at large. SEO is a marketing function and should be approached that way. All too often, SEO information found online focuses on tricks and tactics. Although some of these do work, most companies that employ them are one algorithm change from losing all they’ve gained. As an example, the Panda algorithm update was launched in February 2011, and it affected 12% of the search results in Google. Overnight, billions of dollars were redistributed online. Some companies lost millions of dollars, while companies with well structured websites and solid content offerings made great gains. In general, websites that build value through structural fitness and quality content offerings tend to be immune to major and minor algorithm changes, while websites that use tricks and tactics end up losing in the end. You should avoid being wooed by the cool tricks and fancy talk you sometimes hear from SEO companies. Instead, look for organizations that understand traditional marketing, and companies that have a mechanism for applying those traditional concepts to your online marketing campaigns.
Maintaining a Long Term Outlook for SEO
Search and the devices that use search will continue to evolve. As a business owner, you will want to stay ahead of the evolution by properly structuring the information you publish to the internet. Focusing on the information architecture, technical fitness and the quality of your content will ensure that your information continues to be relevant to searchers and search engines.
Here at 360Partners, we take a long term approach to search engine optimization. We understand that people’s search habits, and the devices that people use for search will change, but the fundamentals of structuring, managing and presenting content will remain the same. Search engine optimization is a key channel for online marketing success, and we’ve developed principles, processes and policies that consistently work for our clients.
To learn more about 360Partners world-class SEO offering, send an email to searchmarketing@360partners.com. We would be happy to sit down with you to learn more about your business, and how we can help you optimize current natural search opportunities and capture new ones.
About the author: Sidney Nicholas is lead SEO Specialist for 360 Partners. He has been actively managing SEO campaigns since 2006. His online marketing beliefs center on a long term approach to SEO. His focus is on developing strategies that provide long term value to site owners and search engines.
