Why SEO is About More than SEO
It’s easy to think SEO = Google rankings. While this is part of Search Engine Optimisation, it is far from the only thing SEO can impact, particularly in today’s digital landscape. It’s a bit like thinking pancakes = breakfast. This isn’t wrong, but pancakes can also be lunch or dinner or dessert (and if you haven’t had pancakes for a meal other than breakfast – change that immediately!). Understanding what SEO can impact directly and indirectly can help you understand just how powerful and valuable it can be.
It sounds simple but there’s often a little more to SEO than people think. Yes, at its most basic and direct, Search Engine Optimisation is about optimising your site so it appears high in search results for certain keywords. But it goes further than this. SEO is also about ensuring the user likes the site and therefore doesn’t bounce off, explores further, and spends more time on a page, all indicating that it was the right result for a particular search.
It’s also about taking that traffic from the SERPs, and turning it into enquiries and conversions through creating engaging content that is enjoyable to use and meets the user’s request. This is why SEO ties in with many other marketing practices. So, what are those other channels?
There’s a reason we offer UX and CRO services alongside SEO – they work better together! Although we have always tried to partner UX and SEO tactics, since the Page Experience update in 2021, user experience has never been more important. Google wants to give searchers what they want: an answer to their question. Making that difficult through poor experience can in turn affect your rankings.
If SEO gets a site showing up on search engines and UX gets people to stay there, CRO is the next step of the journey: getting people to convert! While SEO starts with getting people on the site, getting people to convert is also an indirect impact of good SEO (and in turn, good UX). SEO is about helping your site perform at its best and creating conversions is part of this.
Google Ads and paid social media marketing can both be very powerful ways to market your brand but if the page they direct someone to is not optimised, you will be spending money on clicks only and not the results you really want. Following best practices for SEO, alongside optimising for user experience (funny how these all overlap hey…), means those expertly crafted ads will be followed up by an expertly crafted landing page and voila, better ROI!
This is along a similar vein as paid marketing in that it’s all about matching your hard work in your emails with a good landing page. Email marketing goes to a warm audience who are already interested in your brand, so it’s important to keep them on this journey with good content that aligns with your EDMs.
At the end of the day, I am a huge fan of a combined approach to your marketing. Often, brands will pick and choose marketing channels and consider some not worth the money or time but with so many channels affecting each other, a united approach is best. Of course, different industries have different marketing mixes, but if you are looking at paid advertising, don’t forget your organic approach!
Of course, my love for SEO is biased, but if you need more convincing, give us a call or check out our other articles on the topic!
