What Strategic Goals Can You Fulfill with SEO?

SEO, once a highly specialized task relegated to the back rooms of a website development team. Now, a mainstream marketing activity. Search engine optimization is a marketing function, and it needs to be treated like one. SEO practitioners need to understand this. The services, products, overall business strategy, competitive landscape, branding, future site development, and related business components. They need to do this just as much as members of other marketing divisions, whether online or offline.

Although SEO is not a cure-all for businesses, it can fit into a company’s overall business strategy in several critical ways* like:

Increase website traffic with SEO

Long gone are the days of a “build it and they will come”. Today’s environment is highly competitive, and you need great SEO to ensure targeted, high-quality traffic to your site. Of course, a business that engages with many of its customers using offline channels can tell them to visit their website. This is how they can drive traffic. But the SEO practitioner fills the different, more critical role, of bringing new prospects to your website. They bring in new audience, different from your regular readers. 

Experienced SEO practitioners know that users search for products, services, and information. To do this they are using a wide variety of search queries and query types. A SEO specialist performs keyword research to determine which search queries people actually use.

For example, when searching for a set of golf clubs, it may be that some users will type in left handed golf clubs as a search query. The person who enters left handed golf clubs as a search query may not even know that such a company exists until she performs that search. Or if she does know that one exists, it was apparently not top of mind enough for her to seek the company’s website out directly.

Capturing that traffic would provide the company with incremental sales of its golf clubs that it probably would not have gotten otherwise. Knowing that, the SEO process works on a site architecture strategy. Also a link-building strategy to help the site’s pages achieve competitive search engine rankings for these types of terms.

Improve website ROI

Branding and traffic are nice, but the most important goal is to achieve the goals of your organization. For most organizations, that means sales, leads, or advertising revenue. For others, it may mean the promotion of a particular message. An important component of SEO is to deliver not just traffic, but relevant traffic that has the possibility of converting.

The great thing about SEO is that it can result in dramatically improved website ROI. Whether you are selling products, services, advertising or just looking for branding value. Even if you are just trying to promote a specific viewpoint to the world, a well-designed SEO strategy can result in a very high return on investment.

For many organizations, SEO brings a higher ROI when compared to TV, print, and radio. Traditional media is not in danger of being replaced by SEO. But SEO can provide some high-margin returns that complement and enhance the use of offline media.

Data released by SEMPO in early 2009 shows that organic SEO is considered one of the very highest ROI activities for businesses. In addition, a growing number of businesses operate purely online. Two examples of these are Amazon and Zappos.

Increase website visibility (branding)

Consumers assume that top placement in the search engines is like a stamp of approval for a business. These users believe that the company ranks highly in the search engines because it is the best in the field, right? If you are an experienced search engine user, you probably recognize that the above statement is not true. However, the fact is that many consumers, and even business seekers, sometimes get confused with the search results.

Therefore, for critical brand terms, the SEO should work toward improving the search engine rankings for the website she is working on. There is a subtlety here, though. Few businesses will need help for their company name; that is, if your company name is 11Digits, you will most likely rank #1 for that search term even with little SEO effort. There are a few reasons for this. One of the most important is that many of your inbound links to your site will use your company name as the anchor text. Very few links will be given to other websites using your company name as the anchor text.

However, if you sell LED signs, you will want to rank well for the search term LED signs. When users see you ranking highly on that search term, they will assume you are the best places to buy LED signs. SEO for branding is about ranking highly for the generic search terms that relate to the purpose of your website.

With SEO, the most successful are those who view site optimization as a lifestyle choice. The results may not appear instantly, but they will reward a business. You just need patience and prudent commitment. The more ideas and tips, the more chances to get right on top. Do not hesitate to contact us right now.

You want it, we web it.

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* You can read more about in The Art of SEO by E. Enge, S. Spencer, R. Fishkin, J. C. Stricchiola