We are frequently asked these questions about SEO:
- Should I use SEO?
- Why is SEO better than other forms of marketing?
- How can SEO help me get more customers?
SEO or search engine optimization is the most powerful form of marketing available because you are getting your message in front of potential consumers searching for your services. There are zero marketing tools out there that are more powerful than SEO. If you look at traditional advertising such as radio, print, television, or offline displays the goal is to get your message in front of as many people as possible in the hopes that someone needs your services. Sure, there is a call to action portion and you can convince people they need your services but with all of the traditional advertising noise, it is more difficult to do so. Some industries will never leave traditional advertising such as big brands leveraging brand awareness and local businesses selling commoditized products. But for the majority of local, small, and medium-sized businesses SEO is currently the most powerful form of marketing.
Why SEO is the best marketing tool out there
Again, you are getting your message in front of consumers who are searching for your product. You can even segment these customers and have specific messages for each of a group of search phrases. For example, we have a landing page for consumers searching for marketing companies, social media companies, and SEO companies. Not many people search for “All in one digital marketing company”. We have to adjust our campaign based on the search traffic. This enables us to have control over what messages are delivered to our consumers when they are searching. The same goes for blogs as well. If you see above on the blog you noticed those three questions. Those are strategically placed keywords. We want potential consumers who are searching for answers to SEO to see our blog, read the content, and then seek our assistance or advice regarding SEO. This enables us to reach even more consumers than the standard short tailed “SEO Company”, “Marketing Company”, or “Social Media Company in Atlanta”.
SEO is also very measurable. The only tool that may be more measurable than SEO is pay-per-click marketing utilizing Bing Adcenter or Google Adwords, the more expensive twin brother of SEO. Utilizing SEO correctly you can include a call to action on your website, contact forms, redirect numbers, and hard cold data analytics that shows X amount of people enter our website and X amount have called on the different forms or used the different redirect phone numbers.
The shortcomings of SEO
Though we have discussed why SEO is the best tool there are some shortcomings of SEO. The first one is there are only so many people a month searching for your services or products. There is no real way to increase the demand of Google searchers searching for your keywords. That is why SEO is very analytical. “X” amount of people search a month for these keywords and you can expect to obtain “X” amount of leads or revenue. The second shortcoming or downfall is no one can control Google, Bing, or Yahoo. No matter how many promises an SEO company makes they are not the ones who know what is in the Google search algorithm, nor do they control it. They can only provide a service to TRY to rank you for those keywords. There are over 200 factors that go into the Google algorithm. Some mean more, some mean less. For someone to say we can guarantee something is a white lie and they are, in reality, gambling that you will rank for those keywords. Generally, good SEO companies can show the average it takes to see results. We can tell our clients we have ranked 90% of our clients for their main keyword phrases within one to six months. We can also say on average our clients receive a 6-to-1 ROI on our SEO services. But this also depends on the competitiveness of the keyword phrase. If a keyword has a $100 pay-per-click value the competitiveness is much greater and you have to think other companies are doing SEO as well if not all of them. So those keywords are much more difficult compared to your niche rural area keyword phrases.
Even though there are some shortcomings SEO is currently the most powerful form of marketing. No other marketing technique can deliver the ROI on a campaign consistently throughout time. It is no wonder why digital marketing budgets have increased so much and pay per click values have increased so much over the past four years. It works and delivers for the majority of businesses.