SEO is one of the biggest marketing buzz words in the last few years. Many companies approach Search Engine Marketing agencies, and in turn these agencies encourage the companies to invest part of their marketing budget on SEO. However, SEO isn’t relevant for every company, and investing marketing budget into SEO efforts could result in wasting valuable budget which could have been directed elsewhere.
Don’t get me wrong. SEO is important – just not for everyone.
So is SEO good for you?
First of all lets consider your field of activity, if you are a business directed at other businesses (B2B) most likely you will have to reach your target audience with other methods such as Social Media Marketing (SMM) and even a direct approach. Second, we need to check out the search volume of various relevant keywords and key phrases, you can use the Google keyword tool to do so.
If your phrases have a high search volume you should check their relevancy and competition, both these terms need to be taken literally and their weight in determining the SERP is a trade secret of the If they are too general try and focus and phrases which are more relevant. If the competition is high, try checking different kinds of phrases. Usually it is recommended to focus on a bulk of long tail keywords so you will get highly relevant and focused traffic rather than focusing on one general keyword.
If your phrases have a low search volume, your site, service or product is in a small niche. In this case you should try and find keywords or phrases with higher search volume. Failure to find such keywords is an indication that SEO is not for you. Either way, you should consider the ROI you will get from your SEO investment.
To calculate your SEO ROI you need the following data: monthly traffic, expected traffic increase (this depends on your industry and the SEO level of your site), traffic conversion percentage (calculation of total purchases/conversions divided by total traffic), average purchase per user. This data can help with calculating your expected revenue from your SEO efforts, and then you need to divide it to by your annual SEO expenses to get your ROI.
If the ROI is bigger than 1, your SEO efforts will bring a profit. If your ROI is 0-1 you should consider other online marketing strategies or lower your SEO expenses.
Finally it is recommended you should focus on high quality traffic, conversions and conversion rates rather than focusing on rankings.
What SEO should I do if SEO is not good for me?
Even though you decided SEO is not a viable marketing strategy for your business, you can still use some basic SEO methods to improve your traffic.
- Build a basic SEO friendly site
- Register your XML sitemap to the Google Webmaster tools
- Include relevant textual content on your site
- Define your target audience and focus on building a great site for this audience.
What other online marketing strategy can I use?
There are many alternative online marketing strategies you can use to approach your target audience. Social Media Marketing tools enable you to find the arenas of activity of your target audience, taking part in these arenas will bring you closer to that audience. PPC campaigns (sponsored links on search result pages) will help you bring immediate traffic to your site (also great for testing). Content campaigns are good branding tools, so are media campaign. PPC, content and Media campaigns are good for any kind of budget, small or big, which will generate different amounts of traffic respectively.
