SEO

Why focus on SEO?

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising a website so it appears on page 1 in the search engines (primarily Google) for the search phrases prospects who do NOT know of the website or business use, when searching for the products and services that the business and website attempt to sell
• Another part of SEO, often ignored, is optimising your brand on search engines when people are specifically researching that business.  SEO itself should help this by providing quality content on business directories and other properties when they directly represent the brand. These elements of SEO should not be inaccurate as this can have a negative impact on this. This is why you are required to quality check these parts of the campaign
• Traffic from search engines is highly desired as prospects are often in a purchasing frame of mind when searching for what they need. They are in the market to buy when they search for your product. So the conversion process to a lead or sale from search engine traffic is often a lot higher than other forms of interruptive styles of advertising.
• Paid traffic from search engines is also getting more and more expensive. As such, despite the early investment required to position a website well, over time the ROI from SEO traffic can be much higher than that from paid traffic.

Important Notes:

1. SEO as a service is designed to “optimise” the way a website (and the business it supports) performs in the search engines
2. SEO really should only be seen as a foundational (albeit an important one) building block to a robust marketing strategy
3. SEO does not do anything outside the relationship between the search engines and websites
4. Typically (but not always) this translates into an improvement in traffic to the website
   1. A limitation of SEO is that this is not always the case. In some industries there is limited “stock” for search traffic
   2. Assuming a successful campaign does send more traffic to a website, the next limitation of SEO is that it does not take responsibility for converting that search traffic into more or better leads. In fact, the implementation of an SEO campaign may even work against this
   3. Conversion rate optimisation is the service which creates value here. This can be invaluable when working together with meaningful SEO
5. SEO does not build a database for prospect nurturing.
6. SEO is not part of a sales process either it does not convert leads to sales
7. The major players can also randomly change the rules, resulting in degradation of results.