Do you have an SEO strategy in place?
If so, answer this question: has it helped you increase rankings, web visits and sales?
If not, here is the question you need to ask yourself: how can I implement a successful SEO strategy?
SEO will never be a short-term solution but it will lead to more traffic and increased sales when properly implemented.
Developing an effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy delivers serious and sustained growth without putting your business at the mercy of social media or the ability to keep paying for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
By matching search terms to specific user intent potential customers find what they are looking for when they click. These organic search visitors produce lower bounce rates and higher dwell time meaning they are more likely to become customers. That’s simply better-quality traffic than from other sources.
SEO also has the huge advantage of building a valuable resource that will keep on giving year after year, for instance:
- Producing great, evergreen content that will continue to drive visitors to a website long after it was created.
- Building a well-balanced profile of backlinks from authoritative and/or relevant websites that will continue to positively impact organic search rankings long into the future.
- Creating an effective website optimised for conversions that will continually transform visitors into customers.
These are just some of the reasons every business needs an effective SEO strategy.
Of course, even in the SEO world businesses don’t have as much control as they might like. Rules change and competitor activity can knock well-planned strategies off track, but providing you have been following the rules and working within Google’s guidelines then any effect from algorithm changes or competitor activity will be minimal and any negative effects easily corrected.
Look at the organic search data below to see what a focused SEO strategy can achieve – more than doubling web visits in a year:
The Alternatives
For a sustainable way to grow a business where you can control costs and develop your website as a valuable asset then SEO should be one of your top digital marketing priorities. But there are, clearly, other approaches to digital marketing and it’s always good to have a diversified approach so let’s look briefly at some of those alternatives.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
PPC Ads can be very useful for new businesses building their brand and customer base, or for promoting new products, because they generate instant web traffic. But they are expensive and there’s a lack of control – rules change, costs rise; and, more importantly, if you stop paying for your PPC ads there will be no more love from this particular channel – web traffic will simply fall off a cliff.
Social Media
Social media, again, is excellent for raising brand awareness and for increasing individual or company credibility. It can also drive huge increases in traffic but the impact of that web traffic on sales or leads is unpredictable because user engagement via social media for many businesses is low.
When it comes to LinkedIn, there are some niche areas which can benefit from individual activity, especially for small B2B companies, but it won’t deliver the wider reach of Google Ads or an SEO campaign. And where LinkedIn content appears in organic search listings it is always for queries with very low searches volumes so delivers very few visitors.
For an assessment of how well your current SEO campaign is performing get in touch to find out more about our Technical SEO Audit service.
Call us on 01494 530233
Email us at hello@dittodigital.co.uk
