First let me be clear, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not a strategy for big business, or medium sized enterprises, or even for small businesses. It is a strategy for any business of any size that wants to become a recognized brand online. It is vital that you are able to differentiate your brand from that of your competitors.
SEO is the best way to bring search engine traffic, i.e. visitors, who are looking for exactly what you have to your website.
However, SEO is not the only tool in our toolbox. We have many others such as, Pay-Per Click, social media etc. and of course offline media. Together, if used properly, they can help you achieve your full marketing potential. This is where we want to be, because having all of these factors working in tandem gives us the potential for exponential growth. So the challenge therefore is not to find which of all of the possible options is best, but to build a strategy that utilises them all.
If you come across a situation, where your marketing professionals are each telling you that their particular specialism is the one you should be using, then remember they must be collaborating not competing. It is in your medium and long-term interest to have the best combination. They should be working together to ensure that you derive the maximum benefit from your investment. Not from the individual components, but in totality.
There will always be a temptation to go with what is new, trendy or even possibly faddy. It is essential that care is taken to ensure that only White Hat techniques are employed. It only takes a small tweak of the ranking parameters that Bing and the other search engines use for years of hard work to be flushed away. The world of marketing and especially online marketing evolves at a fast pace, so constant evolution or change is expected.
Embracing change however, does not mean expecting a sudden or faster win. It means slowly evolving what you do and how you do it. This will give you your incremental gain and constant advantage.
If you engage an agency or a team of professionals, you should expect them to collaborate as discussed earlier. From a practical point of view if you make something available online regardless of where it is, such as on twitter, Facebook or some other website; you must first and foremost consider your brand and then secondly consider how the search engines will rank this new content. It is easy to ignore a post on twitter because it is short and functionally has a short lifespan. In reality that Tweet does not go away. Each remains on the twitter servers and is accessible to anyone at any time. Everything you do online should be part of an integrated whole.
It is common within a marketing campaign to provide content in multiple channels, some of which will be digital and therefore online, others will be print and therefore offline. However, even the simple view is probably incorrect as the printed material is probably available as a PDF for download. If we consider a more complex example, such as video, then it is probably available online, for on demand access; broadcast directly to a TV; or shown as incidental content at a trade show or in a lobby.
As you can see, because there is no real distinction, from a practical perspective between all of the different types of media and by extension content the traditional silos used in marketing must go away. This means that a holistic approach must be taken, as all of the activities are interrelated.
No matter which channel you use and regardless of your target call to action, you should expect someone to visit your website even in passing. If you have high quality original content, there is a good chance that they will stay and be engaged with it. After all, that was your secondary goal. You will always want someone to visit your website regardless of whether they followed your original call to action. This is why all content that appears online should be optimized for the search engines to process. If it is online, then they will see it.
It is very easy to treat all of the disparate marketing channels and activities as separate entities. Each of which is to be optimised in their own right. This however will lead to a sub-optimal outcome because these marketing channels and activities are not separate, they are linked together by virtue of all being online. If something is online, then it is indexed by the search engines and therefore should be optimized for the search engines. Even offline channels ultimately link back to your online presence, i.e. your website, so they too must be taken into account as the message must be consistent.
Ensuring that all of your content is optimized for the search engines will drive more traffic and therefore more engagement and more sales to your business.
SEO is a fun and facinating field, if you would like some help, courses, tools etc, then we’re more than happy to help. Give us a call and see how!