Is SEO Dead? Well, isnt that a controversial question. Ask this question in a group of SEO professionals the room will engulf, implode or explode! SEO has never gone away. It’s both taken seriously and dismissed by businesses from every marketplace and size!
From start ups to multi nationals SEO is either a serious strategy with heavy investment or an after thought tacked on to existing marketing efforts.
Bold statements but true! There maybe a division / department with marketing dedicated to SEO and it may well produce data to justify ROI from ‘organic’ traffic. Creating reports for spend and ROI for organic traffic can be an artform as well as a science. What’s my point? Seperating organic from paid traffic can be tricky unless your analytics are setup correctly to measure everything!
Example 1 Your website is found from a local search, a FREE Google business listing! No SEO or very little! The phone rings the prospect called but didnt visit the website! Strange behaviour you may think but people still do this. They find a service and call the number, how do you factor that into your SEO ?
Example 2 Someone calls you from your Facebook (FB) business profile page. They dont click through to your website. They make an appointment and become a paying customer. Is this success attributed to your SEO spend?
Assigning tags, recording conversions is important regardless of how your time and budget is being spent. Startups generally are not cash rich and can afford to have a marketing team carrying out activity that covers all internet opportunities on offer. Dabbling in a bit of FB here, tweeting as and when they feel like it, video is something to do and writing content is just so time consuming. So how do businesses go about setting up an SEO roadmap?
I used to explain SEO in the most basic way I could. Keywords! The search phrases people use to search for products and services you have to offer, have to be on your website! if they are not you will never be found! However, they have to be part of good content, content that makes sense and recognised by Google as valuable to people searching using the keywords you want to be found for! Simple? Of course it is. Write good content that includes keywords and be found when people search for you! Wait, its not so simple! Why? Because there are 1000’s of content articles being published every seconds by SEO’s aiming to be on page 1 of google for the search phrases you want to be number 1 for. Simple?
SEO used to be simple. And then SEO became big business. There are different approaches to SEO. If you do not start out with a clear strategy you will either waste a lot of time or money or both. And with very little to show. With a clear roadmap your efforts will much more likely show positive results.
A good SEO roadmap is not difficult. In fact the beauty of creating a roadmap for your SEO efforts will become part of your goal setting and targets. which can be very rewarding. As a result your rewards will be an encouragement to invest more time to SEO activity.