There’s no time like the present to implement work that will have a long term impact. And by focusing specifically on SEO, you will improve your chances of success and drive down the effort you have to make to reach your commercial objectives.

Read on to discover the far-reaching impact of SEO and how it will boost your digital marketing efforts across the board.

How Can the SEO You Do Now Help You Succeed in the Future?

Good technical SEO underpins any digital marketing campaign - whether you are a content marketer trying to generate leads via inbound marketing or a paid search consultant running PPC ads through Google and Bing.

If your website is built in a search-friendly way then you should have a more user-friendly website as well - with a clear structure, obvious messaging on your pages, and a better overall search presence meaning better brand recognition.

Simply put: when users have a better experience on your website, they convert at higher rates.

Additionally, good SEO will help you establish your brand credentials both on and off your website. You should aim to demonstrate your expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T) through:

• Adding the right information to your website
• Encouraging good blogging practices
• Working with your content marketers to build links from authoritative sources in your industry
•  By advising on the best ways to obtain good word of mouth through social media and third party review services

How Does the SEO Work You Do Now Impact All Your Marketing Efforts?

Many of the specific activities we undertake for SEO individually lead to marginal improvements. For example, if we were to speed up how quickly your pages load by half a second, you might find your results rank on average a position higher. This might lead to a few hundred more visitors who would drive additional sales. In addition, the speed improvement would likely also reduce the bounce rate and drive up the conversion rate by, say, 0.5% as well.

If you combine these modest returns with optimising the alt text on your images so you drive more traffic from image search and revising your meta descriptions to improve click-through-rates from Google, each of these changes will also increase your traffic. And because your site speed improvements improved your conversion rate, a higher percentage of that traffic will convert! 

Additionally, a higher percentage of the traffic you receive from paid search and from social media will also convert because your site loads faster and your pages are better - so your SEO efforts will have driven more revenue from all channels.

This means that the work you do for SEO now will continue to drive increased returns for the long term. Without completing that site speed work in 2020, your 2021 campaigns will have driven less ROI across the board.

How SEO Can Enhance Your PPC ROI

SEO will help improve the performance of your PPC campaigns at the same time. When you have strong landing pages that contain, for example, clear copy and good keyword targeting, not only will your pages rank better in organic search and drive more visitors, but you will improve your Quality Score. This means your PPC ads will show at a higher position more often and at a lower cost per click (CPC).

Using SEO to Boost Brand Awareness

Another knock-on-effect of focusing on SEO now is an overall increase in brand awareness which will have long term benefits across the board. Any exposure to your brand will help improve click-through-rates and will make consumers more likely to consider your brand, even when they may have a preference for a competitor brand.

If consumers begin to see your brand when they search, especially if you come up at all the different stages of the buying cycle - from when they are merely reading relevant publications or browsing social media to when they are actively researching to when they are making a purchase decision - they will begin to innately trust your brand and will be more likely to visit your website and to become a customer.

Having that additional exposure in the search results will make your efforts in other channels more successful (in the same way that your marketing efforts in other channels will help drive more organic conversions).

SEO: the Stealth Weapon in Your Armoury 

Businesses often find themselves frustrated with their SEO efforts because it can take time to feel the impact of SEO work - and because SEO work is often hard to see. However, throwing all your budget into paid search simply because you can see the results immediately can have a knock-on impact of making your paid search results less good in the long-term because you leave fundamental roadblocks to conversion in place. You also deprive yourself of a huge source of traffic.

Investing in SEO alongside your other search marketing activities means investing in the long-term success of your business.

SEO and I-COM

Above is a snapshot of the type of SEO activities you could implement right away to start boosting your brand’s presence. If you want to hear what else we could do to drive your digital marketing presence and improve your ROI, just get in touch.

Call us on 0161 402 3170 or fill in our handy contact form, and our SEO gurus will get right back to you.