Are you Committed
Some of you may have heard the saying: Are you the pig or the chicken. When it comes to eating a breakfast of egg & bacon, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. When it comes to your online search campaigns, are you the chicken or the pig? Should the type of business you are in help decide whether in fact you should be a chicken or a pig?
We all agree ROI is important. We all agree that any marketing or business activity should have some form of ROI. How do we best manage the link between SEO and ROI, especially when there are very different players, angles, business models all trying to rank for the same keywords?
Consider the graph below and how the various players might interact or see SEO in their business model.
The Large Consumer Bank would have a large dependency on their website for operations i.e. Internet banking, applications and so on, however when it comes to sales they would have multiple, multiple sales channels from account managers to television spots to in branch activities, all driving people to convert either online or offline. Operations would be driven by complex systems integrating to the front end behind the scenes. May take a couple of touch points to convert a customer. While the need for SEO might be considered small, being found online for all the campaigns, slogans is not. SEO is integral, most of them just realize how integral.
The Online Auctioneer has a high dependency on both. Getting visibility and cheap traffic to their site as well as lots of online interaction on the website, to view, favourite, communicate etc. May only take a single touch point to convert a customer. They depend on search engine traffic for survival. SEO is critical, integral to the business model.
The Business to Business Fund Manager has little functionality driving their website when it comes to operations and gets most of their business from relationships and marketing to a select group of individuals. It takes multiple touch points to convert a client. SEo is nice to have but not really going to make a fundamental change to business.
The Financial Aggregator must have cheap traffic, as margins on a conversion would be lower than say for a bank. They are dependent on search engine traffic to survive. SEO is critical, must be integrated into the business model.
Currently all these players want some form of SEO done, however when it comes to deep commitment across the organisation to deliver on SEO, things can waiver when the business is not totally reliant on traffic to the website for survival. We see the aggregators get this, the online auctioneers not really and the banks talks about it but do not always follow through.
The Challenge for Marketing Managers
SEO is currently a hot topic, everyone is talking about it, few understand it and not all SEO staff are born the same:
- Few realize the effort required to rank for competitive search terms
- Many have been burnt by over promising, under qualified search agencies or hires
- Most realize that the branding and conversion offered from search far exceeds any campaigns or offline ads they may run
- Some understand that SEO is not a short term campaign, but a longer term commitment to the organisation’s visibility on the Internet
- None to my knowledge understand the link between SEO and social media yet
How might your SEO strategy differ, depending on what you do?
If you are the aggregator or the online auction house, your very survival is dependent on volumes of relevant traffic to your site. Ranking for high volume product or service related terms is key. As paid search costs increase, it may become increasingly harder to “break-even” with paid search. SO SEO in everything you do should be core to the business, from articles to landing pages to engagement objects. These guys should be designing their sites from the ground up, heavily involved in social media and link-building and all parts of the operation should have some level of understanding of SEO. Cheap traffic to your site is imperative.
If you are a large organisation receiving traffic from the aggregators, there may be some frustration that firstly you cannot rank yourself, giving your organisation the “prior” click and also of course the branding. But competing organisational requirements, rules, procedures and policies can often stand in the way. In these organisations where sales come from multiple channels the want is there but the commitment to SEO is often “wanting”, given the challenges and also understanding that SEO is not a campaign, like a competition, but something you should be engaged with ongoing, like usability, security etc.
You might want to optimise around prioritised terms, terms which relate to products which drive a high margin, maybe not high volumes and be selective about what you target. So instead of targeting “credit cards”, which the above mentioned will be aggressively targeting, go for “student low rate balance transfer” which relates to a product you might have.
If getting more traffic to your site is a nice to have then get some basic SEO done, write nice articles and be happy with what the proverbial cat drags in. Often just identifying the right terms can be a challenge, as opposed to using brand talk.
In conclusion
SEO takes commitment, given the high levels of competition. Should you choose not to play that is fine, but can you afford to explain why as a business you did not focus on getting results from one of the best ways to bring relevant visitors to your website? Probably not….
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