As our world continues to become more digitally connected and technology continues to assimilate further into business culture, organizations will have to place a greater emphasis on leveraging the strategies and tools that will allow them to better compete in today’s marketplace. Consumers no longer have to use the yellow pages to seek out information, or go into brick-and-mortar stores to purchase items. Instead, they’re able to access all the business, product, and service information imaginable at the touch of a button – from anywhere – at any time. With an average of three billion searches per day, it’s no wonder why internet search has become such a critical component to modern marketing strategies.
The Basics
SEO (search engine optimization); everyone wants it, but few companies have a strong enough grasp to execute best practices and properly align it with supplemental marketing efforts. Simply put, SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement on the search results page of a search engine such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. To do this, search engines utilize complex algorithms that factor in various elements, like keyword density, META tags, titles, inbound links, websites' traffic and content, to determine which websites are most relevant to particular search terms.
The Mistake
According to a study on Google result positioning, the top listing in Google’s organic search results receives 33 percent of website traffic, compared to 18 percent for the second position, and 11 percent for the third position. Meaning, organizations looking to leverage the benefits of SEO must allocate the necessary time and resources towards developing a disciplined SEO strategy that works to optimize relevant search terms and yield increased traffic.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, ‘great – I understand why search engine rankings are so important, but how do I actually achieve the rankings needed to drive additional visits to my website?’ Unfortunately this is where many companies go (horribly) wrong…
Although an SEO consultant may seem like the perfect solution to aide in your quest for search engine optimization, it’s unlikely that they will be able to deliver the results you’re looking for. Sure, an SEO consultant can significantly improve your organization’s page rank, increase linking domains, and drive additional visitors to your website, but if your SEO strategy is not integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts it will undoubtedly fall short.
Lack of Alignment
By definition, a consultant is a professional who provides expert advice in a particular area – not an entire business function. In the case of SEO consultants, they specialize in optimizing websites to improve search rankings and drive increased website traffic. While this may be exactly what an organization is looking to do, the reality is that if a consultant’s strategy does not align with the other key elements of an organization’s digital marketing campaign, such as content marketing and social media marketing, it can end up creating individual marketing siloes that do not cohesively work together towards the same goal.
The Solution
When used correctly, SEO can act as a huge catalyst for improving your search engine ranking, drawing increased site traffic, and driving lead generation. However, consultants aren’t miracle workers. No matter how talented the consultant may be, if your organization is challenged with a bad product, poor branding, a low converting website, or an offer that doesn’t make sense, driving thousands of visitors to your website will not fix the problem.
Due to the rise of digital marketing, SEO has become one of the most popular buzz words used in marketing today. However, rather than placing all of your eggs in the SEO basket, it’s important to first create a strong marketing foundation that your organization can build from, and ensure that all components of your marketing strategy are fully integrated with one another.
Interested in learning about how a Denver consulting firm quadrupled lead production? Download the Eventus SEO Success Story.
