Top 10 Ways SEO Adds Value To Your Digital Presence

SEO is one of only two digital strategies that a business can employ in order so their website can be found on the first page of Google. Business owners that I speak to who have a solid understanding of digital marketing through experience will often have a broad but basic understanding of the differences between SEO and it's alternative pay search engine marketing (SEM) that is something akin to this: 

Short term vs long term strategies. One offers instantaneous visibility for as many keywords as deemed relevant and desirable to that business providing they can afford the cost of the click. Clicks that occur in the organic space (which is impacted by SEO) on the other hand are without charge as it works on a system of earning visibility rather than purchasing it by creating a website that offers relevant information of the highest quality and mixing it with a good user experience. The latter takes longer to achieve for those desired keywords but once accomplished is far more likely to be the route chosen to your site by the available market that is seeking it and therefore should offer a far higher r.o.i. The sacrifice of uncertainty and timelines for success is counterbalanced by not only increase market access but the cost of this strategy when outsourced should be only between 50-60% of the SEM required budgets.

Nothing inherently incorrect about that basic understanding of search engine visibility options but I find it doesn’t go nearly far enough in articulating the value that the latter can provide when comparing the cost and benefits of these two options.

To fully appreciate the value of SEO in its basic format it is essential that clients have a mindset that considers the future – shortsightedness or impatience is the enemy of SEO as it leads to shortcuts being taken with best practice that will expose the site to potential penalties that can be catastrophic to a business. In this new world of perennial uncertainty, its challenging to find clients who have the flexibility of thought necessary to survive today and yet appropriately plan for tomorrow. With that in mind, the basic understanding of SEM and SEO above is rarely enough to convince budget conscious business owners to allocate necessary dollars that could otherwise be spent on short term traffic, for a concept in which the reality is that any genuine honest agency cannot guarantee will ever deliver the future success that it's merits are based on. On that limited argument, if the choice is SEM or SEO then paid wins the overwhelming majority of cases.

But it's not a fair fight. We need to dig deeper, to articulate the less recognized value that SEO brings to the table in order for it to be given fair consideration by business owners who have these tough budget allocation decisions to make. 

This article speaks to the value of SEO to a business which will at times naturally include comparisons to what PPC can offer a business owner. That said, I am in no way advocating through this article that the end result should be an either or choice for business owners. The benefits of running SEO and PPC together far outweigh either option as a solo effort. My next upcoming article will look to examine what those dual approach benefits look like.

So what are the deeper value adds that successful SEO offers a business?

1 – Increased Market Access

The numbers don't lie. Page 1 average click through rate (CTR) for local businesses is between 7-8% depending on industry and urgency of query. Position 1 will likely get 33% of searches select it which is an eye opening number by comparison to the 1.5% average available from SEM. Position 1 is the dream of course but a realistic goal in the early months is Top 5 as 70#-80% of all site traffic originates from the top 5 organic positions of a SERP. 

2 – Improves PPC Quality Score

By creating pages on your site with content specific to products or services that are offered you will improve the relevance of landing pages you can drive PPC traffic towards. By aligning your text ads message to that content your quality score will improve which will reduce the cost per click paid and will effectively improve the performance of your PPC and allow the budget to go further.

3 – Increase Effectiveness of All Marketing Efforts

The organic space of a SERP was never supposed to be a marketplace, it was supposed to be a repository of information like a library where the most popular books get the best spots on the shelf. That rationale means for industries where consumers will research before purchase and have longer buying funnels, then the organic space is the most desirable avenue for those searches. Broad keywords that are commonly used for people at the start of their buying journey have higher costs than more specific"long tail" terms and they don't convert to inquiry as often following the click as a result of the nature of research. The first benefit of targeting those kw’s through your SEO is that you can remove them from your PPC list and save money that can be redirected into the higher converting, cheaper kw’s closer to purchase. Moreover, retargeting strategies used to stay in front of potential consumers during that consideration phase will be far more effective because of the increased market access that is found through prominent organic positions. It's worth remembering as well that the strategies involved in the SEO campaign fundamentally look to improve the content on the site, consider structural alterations from a user experience perspective which translates into better navigability and a more conversion friendly entity. This new, more efficient website is not only reserved for organic visitors, all traffic channels will benefit which should lead to reducing leaks in the conversion funnel and ultimately improve R.O.I across all traffic channels.

4 – Improves Offline Conversions

50% of all mobile searches are for local businesses and are looking to visit a store on the same day as the search. 18% will actually result in a same day transaction. The information those imminent locally focused customers are looking for is found in the map section of the SERP: business name, hours of operation, address, telephone number and directions to the business. A local SEO strategy is the only path to visibility in that section of the SERP and consequently an absence of that strategy results in a significant inability to make offline conversions as a result.

5 – Decreases Opportunities for Competition

There are 6 paid positions, 3 maps and 10 organic on a SERP. The more positions you take up the less spots there are for your competitors increasing the likelihood of a site visit. If you can align your kw strategy to appear in paid, organic and map sections, then research shows an up to 89% incremental lift in clicks is possible than could be achieved through only one of the strategies. 

6 – Improved Brand Recognition

If organic ranking is based on overall quality and relevance of information and user experience, then it’s fair to extrapolate that mantra to suggest that the highest positions of a SERP are reserved for those considered the authority in their space. Creating content that is consumed and appreciated by its audience will only improve the reputation of the business by industry peers and customers alike. Being perceived as a thought leader in competitive industries can only be a positive for your personal brand and for future opportunities. 

7 – Locates Potential New Markets

Syndicating the content that you create into channels that are more likely to resonate with the audiences that see it serves two purposes. First of all referral traffic that results from that syndication will potentially lead to conversions, and the engagement in your site that comes from that more relevant traffic will boost the metrics that are part of the algorithm that impacts rankings (bounce rate, dwell time, pages visited etc). It also provides valuable insights through analytics data around the impact the various social channels actually offers your business which may determine whether to use paid advertising in these channels. Like a try-before-you-buy, if the content that your SEO efforts creates (such as blogs or videos) with the hope of improving search engine rankings but when syndicated correctly it is re-purposed and can actually identify that social channels (pinterest/facebook/instagram etc) are a valuable source of converting traffic. This data is invaluable as informs the owner to make intelligent business decisions to reallocate budgets into these channels as they should play a bigger role in your overall strategy than originally anticipated.

8 – Promotes Reputation Management

Gone are the days when businesses could get away with poor service without consequences. Whilst offering a good service may not be recognized on Yelp or critically evaluated in the plethora of similar forums online as much as one would like, you can rest assured that a poor experience will be. Statistics show that 89% of consumers will trust online reviews as much as they would a recommendation from a friend and the algorithms have boosted the impact that reputation has on your organic visibility. SEO success therefore requires a business to be aware of their reputation and ensure that they are not undone online by poor performance offline. This can only be a good thing for their future prosperity.

9 – 24 Hour Visibility

Unlike PPC where your overall monthly allocation of funds will be divided into days and as such can spend out a daily budget early if there is unusually large search volume on a particular day. SEO has no such concern. You have earned that spot on the SERP and that means 24 hour visibility. If the lunchtime searchers were click happy and your budget has gone, any absence of organic rankings compounding too little budget will mean zero no access to the evening market share and any opportunities that may have existed will be forfeited to your competition.

 10 - Improves R.O.I

Every marketing budget comes down to dollars and cents at the end of the day. What did you pay and what did you get? Whilst PPC budgets offer instant visibility, they access only a fraction of the market available for any given KW and moreover, the overall budget required for a good presence is anywhere from 50% to 100% more than the necessary SEO budget for that business. Given that SEO when successful offers more market access per kw, costs far less by comparison and helps creates a website far more likely to convert that traffic, its exclusion is difficult to justify. SEO is the glue that brings your entire web presence together and in my opinion should always play a part as in reality, any serious business' digital marketing performance will never be fully optimal without it.