Has your SEO company made an effort to understand your marketing activity?
There’s no doubt that SEO is incredibly important to any business. After all, if your web page is among the first to organically show up in a search, you’re much more likely to get potential customers clicking through to you. So, it’s imperative to make sure your SEO strategy is working alongside the rest of your marketing efforts so you gain maximum impact on your campaigns.
Here are just 10 of the reasons why your marketing activity should align with work carried out via your SEO agency.
1) Making sure everyone is on the same page
You may have an internal marketing team and use established external SEO agencies for any number of reasons. It’s usually because a company’s marketing team was already in place long before the term SEO was bandied about it’s to intensive and costly to fully train an internal marketing team. It’s also likely you want to take advantage of an SEO company’s specialist knowledge. But, if you have made the decision to employ an external SEO company, then it’s important they build relationships with your marketing team, so make sure the marketing strategies and campaigns in place complement each other.
2) Sharing expertise
Your SEO team will need to know all sorts of things about your business so they can perform to the best of their abilities. They will want to know about your products or services, including any that you particularly want to push, along with finding out about your target customer, audience or market. No one is better placed to keep them informed than your marketing team.
3) Great minds
Brainstorming sessions will be even more productive if you bring your SEO and your marketing experts together. You never know where great ideas are going to come from. One of your marketing team may have a fantastic suggestion to make about your SEO strategy, and vice versa.
4) Working towards a shared goal
The bottom line of any marketing campaign is to increase conversions or revenue. All of your marketing channels and activities will help achieve this objective and you’ll get there more effectively with cohesion.
5) Stronger together
Combining your SEO efforts along with social media and any paid-for campaigns will help you to vastly improve your online presence for potential clients. They will see your site pop up in both organic and paid search results and they’ll also feel comfortable connecting with you via social media. All of these things combined will build trust in your brand, leading to more sales.
6) The Delta Airlines example
A clear example of why marketing strategies and SEO have to work together was highlighted at the MozCon digital marketing conference recently. The example of Delta Airlines was given, a company ranked top for their branded search organically, so they decided they would reduce their pay per click (PPC) budget by 50 per cent. The result was a reduction in both PPC and organic search revenues.
7) Timing is key
Both SEO and traditional marketing efforts require long-term planning to make sure activity in both strands is coordinated, and aligned with likely peaks in interest in your product or service at certain times of the year. Working together to the same timescales mean you can have plans in place for seasonal marketing and demand.
8) Important keywords
Google’s policies are rewarding content that is genuinely of interest and of use to users. It may be that your marketing team has always written your content and there’s no need to change that. But, your SEO team will be able to put in the time and effort needed for keyword research, suggesting vital keywords to add into your content.
9) Content distribution
You can create the most fantastic content with the most effective keywords, but you still need to get it out to the right channels rather than simply rely on organic search, and here’s where your SEO company and marketing team can work well together. Your SEO team can make sure content features relevant keywords and phrases naturally while your marketing team can do their utmost to get your message onto the right platforms.
10) Influencing future strategies
Both your SEO and marketing teams will have strategies in place for researching and deciding what type of content is proving most valuable and most popular with potential clients, contacts and customers. By working in partnership, you can make sure what you are following is relevant and engaging, giving it the best chance of being liked and shared by your audience.
By making sure all of your marketing efforts work together, you will get the most out of your strategy, and your marketing budget.
