SEO is more than organic search. It is building a brand.
We come across it a lot. We have potential customers coming to us acting like we are just lead generation machines. Though this is true, we need to view SEO more than a lead/sales generation system and another puzzle piece in the brand-building world.
Here is why it is good to view SEO as building a brand in addition to leads and sales generation:
- It is hard to gauge exact ROI.
Many times, business owners have tunnel vision when it comes to their marketing spend. The basic equation of “I give the marketing company or spend $1 and I expect $5 back on my money or it is a fail” is generally how it is looked. I do not blame them as I have the same outlook many times, but you also have to think about the lifetime value of a customer. What if you spend $5,000 on an SEO campaign and get 1 customer? If your average customer value is $5,000, this looks like a huge failure of a campaign. However, what if that one customer refers 5 of his friends throughout the customer lifecycle? That one lead that looked like a terrible return on the investment actually was a $25,000 value, therefore making a 6 to 1 return on investment.
We see this many times with pay per click and eCommerce stores. We may be only breaking even on our ad spend, but we know more sales equates to a bigger brand. It gives us an opportunity to capture their email addresses for the newsletter or allows us to connect with them via social media.
- You need to be everywhere.
Someone should write a book about being everywhere when it comes to marketing. The most successful brands are literally everywhere for their customers. SEO is a great way “to be there when they need you”. If someone is looking for red boots and you sell red boots, but are not there when they search Google, you do not exist. It also hurts your credibility. Search engines have always been a staple in the customer purchase cycle. If you spend money on advertising and acquiring customers, but are not there when they are ready to buy, you have literally wasted all of your resources getting them to buy a competitor’s product.
- Backlinks are underrated.
I hate when someone says backlinks are dead. This is incorrect, spam, or manual built backlinks died like 2-3 years ago. Good backlinks from high quality websites are still alive and kicking and helping our clients gain positions in highly competitive keyword phrases. The best part about these backlinks is they build trust with the potential customers. Imagine if you have articles posted weekly to Forbes, Inc., or other key influential high authority websites that your target market reads. You will suddenly look like a big brand and your target market will take you more seriously.
Backlinks also can help referral traffic (people clicking through the links) and this will allow you to convert users coming from different websites. Building high authority backlinks creates a gigantic web of content all throughout the Internet. It is almost like public relations, you are trying to make as much noise as possible to build your brand.
- It is a cheap way to get lots of eyeballs on your website.
Generally, using a good SEO company will give you anywhere from 5 cents to $2.50 per click. The way I calculate this is dividing how much MORE organic search traffic you are getting compared to how much you are paying the company. So, if you have a $1,000 a month retainer and get 3,000 MORE organic searchers a month, you are getting a search for around 33 cents per click. Almost 95% of the time, this would crush a pay per click campaign. For that price, you are getting lots of potential customer eyeballs on your website and hopefully are getting good conversions out of it as well.
- Organic search generally has better analytics behind it.
No matter if we are doing pay per click, retargeting, or it is direct traffic, organic search traffic generally has the lowest bounce rates, highest time on page, highest pages per session, and the highest conversion rates. This means, in theory, it should be producing the most revenue/value for your site, whether you judge that based on leads, sales, or events. Organic search traffic produces traffic that is most engaged with your brand and website.
- Impressions count and frequency in everything.
When we started, we never counted impressions as an important measurement. Though I still think it is a coup out for agencies that try to rationalize their failure of a marketing campaign, there should be some merit for organic impressions. The more people see your brand on authoritative websites the higher they are willing to trust you. Which leads us to…
- Big Brands Convert MORE!
Big brands have higher conversion rates. Customers trust them more than smaller brands. You get more people searching for your company name throughout time and more and more people buy your brand compared to your competitors. Being a big brand makes life easy.
It will be interesting to see where SEO is taken in 2016 and onwards. There is a graveyard filled with SEO companies because they did not see the value they brought beyond sales/leads/organic traffic. A good SEO campaign should measure backlinks and the effects they have on them. If you are not doing that currently, you need to begin today!
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