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As we are continuously driving further and further into the digital age, your marketing strategy and marketing team should be evolving with the times to ensure you aren’t falling behind your competitors or getting stuck in a marketing rut.
Most marketers have embraced digital marketing as an important avenue, but one essential element that is often overlooked due to lack of understanding is SEO.
Wait…isn’t SEO dead?
No.
Every year when Google releases new updates about algorithms and changes in the search results, web developers around the globe throw their hands up in defeat and declare that SEO is dead, although that just isn’t the case.
SEO has changed since the beginning, keyword stuffing is no more and gaining thousands of backlinks is no longer the key to success. In fact, not having SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy can be detrimental to your online success.
If you are in an especially competitive industry sector it can be difficult to rank for your primary terms with little to no optimisation of your site for SEO.
Whilst other marketing techniques such as paid advertising can be extremely efficient in some cases, they shouldn’t be relied on solely. SEO and PPC go hand in hand; one really shouldn’t be done without the other if you want to get the most out of your digital marketing.
Here are some reasons why you should consider paying more attention to your SEO:
1. Cost effectiveness
Unlike other marketing methods such as PPC and social media advertising, SEO is usually a fixed price service (depending on the agency and work carried out).
PPC can either be the best or worst way to spend your marketing budget; if you do not have the correct knowledge, budget or time allowance to manage your campaigns your ad spend can escalate and your ROI will suffer.
2. It works
SEO has been given bad press historically as not every SEO company out there will follow Google’s guidelines and use black hat techniques to try to manipulate the search results in your favour.
Statistics have shown that a website that ranks at positions 1-3 can get up to 33% of all users engagement for that search
But Google has cracked down on these malicious attempts with their many algorithms and the number of agencies now offering these black hat services is dwindling, leaving room for trustworthy SEO agencies with the best of intentions for your SEO success.
If SEO didn’t work, people wouldn’t invest in it! There is a lot of information out there about SEO and some great case studies showcasing the success SEO has bought a lot of companies.
3. Being found vs not being found
The bottom line is that without a fully planned out SEO strategy in place, the likelihood of your website ranking above your competitors is very slim. SEO is the difference between being found online and not being found at all.
Whilst methods such as social media and email marketing can deliver you good amounts of traffic, they do not compare to the consistency and ROI of SEO.
4. Mobile has changed the game
You only have to look around to see how the increased usage of mobile devices has sky rocketed.
With the number of searches from mobile devices having overtaken the number of searches made from desktop, being optimised for mobile devices has never been as essential as now. Mobile SEO and local optimisation is an important marketing strategy for both small and large businesses.
5. Your competitors rank above you
If your competitors are ranking above you in the Google search results, it is likely due to their SEO efforts. Ranking at positions 1-3 can be difficult but not at all impossible to achieve, it’s just very unlikely you’ll achieve this visibility without optimising for SEO.
6. Increase ROI, traffic and conversion rate
Statistics have shown that a website that ranks at positions 1-3 can get up to 33% of all users engagement for that search.
You may not be ranking badly currently, let’s say you’re ranking at positions 8-12 for most of your SEO keywords, a little optimising can push you up to the top positions – especially if your competitors aren’t utilising SEO so you can easily overtake.
