I am hearing a lot of chatter online about how SEO is just part of your marketing mix and how you should be diversifying your marketing. That is, reduce the reliance and emphasis on SEO and focus on other areas such as Facebook ads, Adwords, retargeting as well as social media. Basically, still focus on your SEO but shift some of your marketing budget to other platforms.
Now here is the odd thing that I find quite amusing. The people that are proposing this have no idea about SEO and how to rank websites on Google. Therefore they are looking at alternative digital marketing strategies for their clients. Do0n’t get me wrong here. All forms of online marketing is fine and this will leads to some type of lead generation activity.
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But, let me be very loud and clear when I say this. Nothing and I mean nothing is going to help boost your websites traffic numbers more than SEO. Sure, you can give all the other marketing options a try and sure you might like to believe the hype that surrounds the myths related to other marketing channels. But, if there is one thing I can promise you; it’s you will be begging for better SEO rankings once you have exhausted and spent all your money wasted on other platforms.
I am not saying this because we are an SEO agency and I am trying to give us a bit of a plug here. I am saying this because we have tried it ourselves. We have done:
# 1 Adwords – and the cost for this was absolutely mind blowingly prohibitive. I mean the cost per click or PPC came in at about $50 per click. What happened was we were competing against all the other agencies and at the end of the day it was all about price. Basically, you have to drop about $1000 per day to get any decent leads. Just not worth it.
# 2 Remarketing – you know those ads that follow you around once you have visited a website? Again, great if you are a massive brand like Toyota or Nike, but for those small to medium sized businesses, it’s just far too expensive. Sure you may get a few hits but if there is one thing I can guarantee you, you will churn through your dollars quicker than anything. Boom, there goes $100 in an hour. All wasted clicks.
# 3 Facebook ads and Facebook retargeting. Again, as above. Great if you are a big brand with a serious marketing budget. But you can boost posts all you like and at the end of the day it really won’t add up to much. We have done this many times. Tried it time and time again and it simply doesn’t work.
The point I am trying to make here is that for any business looking to get better qualified sales leads, the only real place to get them is Google. You can forget the rest. They are all for show and the only reason other digital agencies are promoting this is that they want either you to spend more money with them (as they get a fee for setting up and managing your campaigns) OR they are just plain bad at SEO and are trying to steer you in another direction. They want you to think and feel that SEO is a ‘long term’, ‘distant’, hard to attain strategy – when it really isn’t. They are feeding you misinformation based on their weakness as digital agencies. WATCH OUT!
This is really bad and can have serious negative ramifications on your business. Why? Because, they are pointing you in the wrong direction. They are misleading you, giving you bad advice based on their inability to rank your website o Google. Trust me when I tell you this. If they knew what they were doing with SEO then they would be working on this rather than fluffing about with other pointless marketing.
Once we stopped focusing our efforts on other marketing channels and put all of our efforts into SEO we saw our rankings rise and our inquiry rate increase at about the same time.
This is not a coincidence.
With our business and most others there is a direct correlation between the number of in bound leads you get and your Google ranking. You can deny this all you like, but the truth never lies. The higher up you are on page 1 – the more inquiries you are going to get. This is the formula we now stick by and will not deviate from in the short to medium term.
As a business we are like any one else. We cannot afford to waste time or loose business to our competitors. Hence the need for SEO.
So if you read online that SEO is only part of your marketing equation, don’t believe it. All that will happen is that you’ll waste a lot of time, money and add to the stress of playing ‘catch up’ once you decide to get serious about your online marketing. Let me ram the point home once more – to generate better sales leads the only thing that really works is SEO.