SEO as a key business investment

Without a comprehensive, integrated marketing strategy SEO is just dumping traffic on your site. SEO is a vital, strategic process – not a quick-fix or a one-off throw-away task. It needs to be properly integrated with marketing and broader business strategy.   The below are all part of the wider formula for online success. But they have profound strategic implications, far beyond the silo walls of the marketing function:

1. Brand awareness

Brand awareness is the foundation of any effective marketing strategy – but strangely in SEO it is often overlooked completely. In SEO terms a lack of brand awareness severely reduces CTR (click-through-rate) and conversion rate. In the broader marketing context, if customers don’t know your brand they cannot trust it. If your page ranks well it probably still won’t get clicks because nobody’s ever heard of you! Why would they trust you? Even if they click through to your site, do you really think they’ll be happy to give their credit card information to a website they’ve never heard of? There are plenty of digital marketing opportunities enabling you to build a high-profile brand in a short space of time. Even with minimal budget the effects of digital brand-building campaigns can be viral and explosive, although with less budget naturally success is harder.

2. Price

Online buyers can easily compare prices, so you need to benchmark yours against your competitors on a regular basis – even if you’re competing on other factors. Offline buyers use their mobile phones to check prices at the point of sale too. So it is essential to have competitive prices to succeed not just online but offline too. This highlights the strategic importance of a lean and efficient operation within the organisation. It highlights the need for an effective procurement strategy, the need to keep costs low. It may reveal a need to outsource, offshore or import goods or services – and even some non-core business functions.

3. Ease of conversion

You’re building a well-known brand. You’ve benchmarked your prices and they’re competitive. 

4. (SEO)

For the reasons outlined at the start of this post, investments in other marketing channels cannot usually offer the same long-term growth potential as SEO investment. If you pay for a PPC, display or magazine ad, for example, the benefit of that investment is finite. With the exception of perhaps some lingering traces of brand awareness, other marketing activities cannot continue to deliver sales for months and years in the way that effective SEO campaigns can.