Con­sumers inter­act with and are influ­enced by organ­ic search through­out their deci­sion jour­ney. With­out a doubt, a well-round­ed dig­i­tal strat­e­gy should include ini­tia­tives in organ­ic and paid search, social media, email, media place­ments, and beyond. Nonethe­less, over time, you will find that SEO is the foun­da­tion­al base of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and a chan­nel you can’t afford to ignore.

Which mar­ket­ing chan­nel deliv­ers the high­est ROI for brands? Numer­ous stud­ies agree it’s organ­ic search.

Yet, despite advance­ments by search engines designed to pro­vide users with high­er-qual­i­ty, rel­e­vant search results, search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) has lost some of its lus­ter.

Oth­er chan­nels have stolen the glo­ry from SEO because they are paid efforts, where ROI is quick and eas­i­ly reportable. While that’s great, fore­cast­ing SEO ROI is pos­si­ble, and you can cal­cu­late SEO ROI with sound ana­lyt­ics and by using the right tools.

The one down­side of SEO? It isn’t quick. SEO must be viewed as a long-term invest­ment.

The great news? SEO can ben­e­fit from your oth­er chan­nel mar­ket­ing efforts and give extend­ed life to your con­tent.

SEO – Steroids For Your Content Lifecycle

Con­tent mar­ket­ing has become all the rage in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing over the past few years. Maybe you’ve been told that con­tent mar­ket­ing is “the new SEO”.

Yes, SEO is always evolv­ing. No, con­tent mar­ket­ing can’t replace SEO – there is much more to SEO than just text, image, or video con­tent.

Do you con­sid­er social media sex­i­er than SEO? If so, think about this: after you’ve paid to have your con­tent dis­persed amongst a throng of inter­est-tar­get­ed social users, or even if it goes viral nat­u­ral­ly on social chan­nels, that viral­i­ty even­tu­al­ly dies and that con­tent asset no longer has any val­ue.

SEO offers an ever­green com­po­nent. Opti­mized con­tent that is key­word-focused will con­tin­ue to attract cita­tions and links and dri­ve vis­i­tors to your domain for years to come with no addi­tion­al invest­ment. Now that’s sexy.

One piece of great con­tent (e.g., a blog post) on a well-opti­mized site will con­tin­ue to live on. Repeat that suc­cess with tens or hun­dreds of pieces of con­tent that are opti­mized for your audi­ence and a steady stream of traf­fic will come to your site.

SEO & PR

Social media mar­ket­ing, con­tent mar­ket­ing, PR, and link earn­ing all adds val­ue to your SEO efforts.

A large por­tion of the over­all effec­tive­ness of SEO is your abil­i­ty to attract author­i­ta­tive links to your site. If you’re doing out­reach to cre­ate rela­tion­ships with oth­er sites and orga­ni­za­tions with the inten­tion of ben­e­fit­ing your brand, in the end, you’re active­ly and pos­si­bly unknow­ing­ly per­form­ing SEO efforts while you’re pay­ing a PR firm to build buzz.

Sim­ply put, buzz becomes links. When is the last time some­one told you to check some­thing out but didn’t pro­vide a link?

If you can cre­ate great con­tent, you will get atten­tion. A well-opti­mized site will con­tin­ue to pro­vide a strong return on your con­tent invest­ment in the future, in the form of con­tin­u­al traf­fic.

SEO & Usability

Improv­ing site usabil­i­ty is anoth­er area that boosts your SEO efforts.

Brands that improve the fol­low­ing usabil­i­ty areas are also address­ing fac­tors that result in a prop­er­ly opti­mized site:

• Cre­at­ing bet­ter infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture.
• Increas­ing key­word-rich inter­nal link­ing.
• Cre­at­ing a bet­ter syn­er­gy between page titles, head­ings, and body copy.
• Improv­ing page load times.

The same ide­ol­o­gy applies to social media mar­ket­ing. If you build an audi­ence and pro­mote great con­tent, then you attain a larg­er audi­ence and high­er engage­ment.

SEO: The Financial Justification

If you’ve been on the fence when it comes to ded­i­cat­ing bud­get and resources to the organ­ic search chan­nel, hope­ful­ly you now real­ize that you’ve actu­al­ly been step­ping into the world of SEO with­out even real­iz­ing it. Now that your feet are wet, it might make sense for you to go all in.

Even though SEO has become the foun­da­tion of many online mar­ket­ing efforts, the face val­ue ROI can be a lit­tle hard to jus­ti­fy. Rest assured that ana­lyt­ics ser­vices and mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions can now accu­rate­ly show what you’re reap­ing from your SEO efforts.

Since its incep­tion, Google Ana­lyt­ics has pro­vid­ed data on site rev­enue and goal accru­al from organ­ic search. Now you can gain addi­tion­al insights such as con­ver­sion mod­el­ing, as Google knows that organ­ic search works with oth­er chan­nels to cre­ate con­ver­sions.

One of my favorite addi­tion to Google Ana­lyt­ics was cus­tom attri­bu­tion mod­el­ing, which pro­vides the abil­i­ty to slice organ­ic search data to under­stand how well organ­ic search works in the long run to either be a first, mid­dle, or last touch­point lead­ing to con­ver­sions.

Anoth­er way to gain clar­i­ty about the ROI of SEO is through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy providers like SEM­rush and Linkdex that have devel­oped report­ing met­rics to val­u­ate organ­ic search pres­ence. This is done by show­ing mar­ket share of organ­ic search or what you would like­ly have to pay per month to gain the same amount of traf­fic through paid search adver­tis­ing.

When you need to jus­ti­fy invest­ing in SEO, these tools and Google Ana­lyt­ics are a great place to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how organ­ic search is per­form­ing. Addi­tion­al­ly, if you have a well-oiled dig­i­tal strat­e­gy, it’s like­ly you’re mak­ing rip­ples in SEO effec­tive­ness.

It’s time to make waves and give SEO the atten­tion it needs. It will pay off!

Is organ­ic search the chan­nel that deliv­ers the high­est ROI for your brand?