SEO often exists on an island of its own.
Yet.
In 2022.
Getting buy-in for an SEO investment is hard enough. But we also face the challenge that many companies still question where it fits with their overall marketing budget.
You’d think we’d have it figured out by now.
Are there technical aspects to SEO? Absolutely. But is all SEO technical? Absolutely not. Not even close. SEO is not advertising. Most businesses budget for PPC in their overall marketing budget. A client I’ve worked with for several years gets about 60% of their traffic from organic search, but they spend roughly 7-10x more on paid search efforts, which generates 20% of their traffic. I don’t think this is an unusual case. I think this is more likely to be the norm. Website “stuff” is still usually an IT expense, not marketing. But creating content for the website could fit into IT, PR or social (marketing) departments.
While SEO has come a long way and developed legitimacy, I believe that until business leaders see SEO as “marketing,” we will not have earned the respect the field has in an effort to digital marketing
Until SEO is firmly considered a “marketing” function, we won’t realize the budgets required to do these things well and have an appropriate amount of time/budget invested, considering the potential value/ROI of an effort Solid SEO.
What is marketing?
Do a Google search and you’ll find the following definition of marketing or something similar:
“The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”
I could stop the argument here. That’s exactly what SEO is for: to promote a business and help sell products and services, including market (keyword/competitive) research.
What does an SEO effort include in 2022?
Everyone has their own approach to SEO. Some might say that SEO involves metadata. Some might say “technical,” including things like addressing page speed.
While these things are certainly true, they are small pieces of an overall SEO approach.
Simply put, SEO is the process of building your business’s web presence to connect with consumers.
This process can start with keyword research, but even this small task/deliverable is a complicated process.
How do we want to position the business, its products and/or its services? Which competitors seem more aligned with our aspirations and seem to perform better for the keywords we’ve identified? Have we identified keywords (from all of our analysis) that we consider to be “very important”, but we don’t have enough relevant pages/content for Google/searchers to fulfill the search intent? If so, how do we intuitively create new pages/content on our website to provide a better user experience and gain organic search presence? How do we cross-promote (link) content so it performs (ranks) better?
Do you realize what hasn’t been said?
Anything technical.
SEO is not just technical
There have certainly been many cases of going into a new SEO engagement and tackling a technical issue and having that be “the thing” that has prevented success. These cases are few and far between. The commonly found “you have a ban: / in your robots.txt” comes to mind.
The technical elements of a new SEO engagement will certainly involve a technical audit (or should). And that’s not just using a tool to tell you everything is broken.
But the technical elements that should exist in an SEO effort can include things like:
Technical crawls using any number of tools (Semrush, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, etc.). Mobile-friendly checks to ensure your pages display correctly on multiple devices, load correctly, recognize content, etc. URL reviews, making sure that, where possible, URL structures align with the keywords you’re targeting for a given page and don’t have any oddities that could affect a page’s ability to rank .
Technical SEO is still important, but it’s certainly different than it was 20 years ago, when there were a lot of hand-coded websites.
Today, many commercial content management systems do a decent job of providing a “search engine friendly” platform. And apart from that, there are plenty of plugins that can help you keep things under control.
More often than not, an SEO effort is really “marketing”
You are working to align your website pages/content to address known searches performed (and the intent of those searches) based on a lot of marketing research.
Do we want our “money pages” to rank? Of course, 100% of the time, if we can manage it.
But is this the content we often identify as “what Google/searchers like/want”? Not always.
Google often groups keywords with intent and groups them as follows:
Informative results (We may need to create witty content and/or a blog post to answer a question searchers may be asking)Transactional results (Are these people looking to buy something/convert; are our pages informative enough, content rich, etc.?)Commercial results (These people are researching brands and services; do we have strong category pages?)
A larger portion of time is spent on these “non-technical” things in an SEO engagement.
Most often, we look for ways to optimize:
Information Architecture.Taxonomy.Content.User Experience.Conversion Rate Optimization.Video/YouTube Content.Local Organic Presence.Articles Related to Online Reputation Management.And More.
Through Google Analytics, other tools and metrics, we optimize our efforts towards the specific goals we are trying to achieve.
Ideally, at the start of an SEO engagement, we can address many of the major technical hurdles. Often, new “things” will appear that will require a technical review.
But what will drive SEO engagement more than anything else is a strategic approach to content and helping clients better position their website (and other assets related to their organic presence) and “drive the action of promoting products or services of a company, including carrying out market studies”. .”
Which is…. marketing
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Mark Jackson is the president and CEO of Vision Interactive, an agency founded in Dallas, Texas in 2005 and specializing in SEO Services, Paid Media Services (Search/Display/Social/Video/Amazon), Local Listing Management and Conversion Rate Optimization. Mark co-founded the Search Engine Marketing Association of Dallas-Fort Worth and the Search Engine Marketing Association of Kansas City and has contributed to Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, Pubcon and Search conferences Engine Strategies.
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