The best marketing plans use a combination of traditional and digital methods to raise brand awareness and introduce products and services to target audiences. The goal is usually to increase engagement and acquire new customers.

 These methods can include:

• Automated email campaigns
• Content Marketing
• Conventions
• Personal sales calls
• SEO
• Social Media
• Telephone prospecting
• Thought Leadership
• Websites

A well-designed marketing strategy curates channels connected to a foundation of information that educates and assists the target audience. Brands build trust, gain top-of-mind awareness, and increase ideal client engagement by offering this information across several channels. The result is a sales pipeline that attracts and effectively engages potential customers at the correct points in the customer journey.

Search Engine Optimization can help:

• Companies using traditional marketing methods
• Organizations trying to move into the digital marketing age but can’t quite figure it out
• New companies trying to build awareness and sales online
• Any entity trying to reach a target audience 

Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing

Your website is the platform that shares your most important information. The information you publish on your static pages should provide essential information about your products, services, and overall company. The information published in your blog should be informational or newsworthy articles that help your target audience not only connect with your company but solve a problem or help your target audience understand a new industry development. SEO is the art of making sure the information you publish on your site connects with your target audience.  

The goal of marketing is to connect your company to your customers. Email campaigns, social media campaigns, and knee-to-knee interactions can effectively leverage the information on your site or blog for greater buy-in and engagement. SEO can help companies understand the information their audience seeks and build that information into website content referenced in all other marketing channels. 

SEO Increases Credibility

People rarely move past the first page of a Google search. Google’s algorithm weighs a variety of factors to match the most trustworthy, informative, and authoritative content to the search intent of its users. Google continually updates its algorithm in a never-ending quest to provide the best results for its users. Your site has a better chance of being recognized as credible and authoritative if it ranks on Google’s first page.

SEO Continually Connects Your Site To Your Ideal Audience 

Search Engine Optimization continually benefits your company once implemented. I don’t mean SEO is a set-it-and-forget-it project, but, unlike paid search or your sales force’s efforts, a well-optimized page continues to drive traffic to your pages every day for years to come. Paid search traffic can be a powerful tool to drive engagement in support of specific initiatives, but the traffic from paid search stops as soon as the campaign ends. And client interaction is only as good as your sales team’s outreach efforts. SEO continually connects your site’s product and service pages to your ideal client’s internet searches. HubSpot estimates there are 63,000 Google searches per second. That translates to 5.6 billion searches per day or over 2 trillion global Google searches per year. A well-defined SEO strategy connects your site to the ideal prospects in that group regardless of when they search or how often that segment searches.

SEO Reaches a Broader Audience

Thorough keyword research can uncover different ways your audience thinks about your product or service. Sometimes these new content avenues are developed into stand-alone pages meant to connect with a segment of your audience you previously missed. Other times keyword research shows that subtopics on a page have enough search support to warrant building a section around a subject with one main page and several related pages focused on subtopics supporting that page. Developing individual pages on each subtopic increases the chance to rank for the keywords on these new pages. These new pages also have a better opportunity to connect to those specific audience segments. 

Search engines see pages in sections as more authoritative because they connect to pages with supporting information which provides a complete picture of the overall topic. Your site offers a better user experience that helps people discover your products or services by optimizing for a specific audience. 

SEO Increases Traffic Quality and Engagement Rates

Search bots have an easier time understanding optimized content that is appropriately structured. Content creators use keyword research to understand how people search for information using search engines. Sites have a better chance of appearing on the first page of search engines by developing and optimizing well-written and informative content targeted to a specific audience. People who land on a page with the information they seek will spend more time on the individual page and, if the page uses a solid internal linking strategy, more time on site. Increased time on site correlates to a lower bounce rate, more time on page, increased number of pages visited per session, high click-through rates, and more returning visitors. 

SEO Increases Quality Lead Generation

Sales brochures were the basis for explaining a company’s products and services in traditional marketing. Salespeople handed brochures to potential clients, mass-mailed them to prospects, and placed them on trade show tables. Anything to get the word out! The most significant disadvantages of a brochure included:

• The information was static. Companies had to spend a lot of money to print new brochures to update information.
• The number of distribution channels is limited.
• The company develops the brochure to TELL the clients what it wants them to know about the product, rather than sharing information clients seek.
• A physical copy of the brochure must reach the customer.

Early websites mirrored company brochures, providing static content slim on search engine optimization and engagement strategy. Companies developed these sites to tell clients what the company thought was important, not give the prospective clients helpful information.

Today’s websites act as a hub for a variety of marketing activities. Companies can increase customer engagement across many platforms linking to a site with: 

• Content developed around client search intent
• Optimized, authoritative, and helpful content
• A carefully considered UX strategy
• A technically sound site structure

Providing content that meets Google’s standards of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) on both static pages and blog posts attract viewers from many audience segments.

Developing social media posts and email campaigns linking to curated material increases engagement with diverse audience segments. And, because SEO and content creation are ongoing, generating content calendars focused on the client’s ever-changing needs means a better chance of continued engagement. Cultivated engagement improves click-through rates and lead generation. All of this means engaging with a more educated consumer with appropriate calls to action throughout the sales funnel. When the potential client is ready to speak with a sales associate, the prospect understands the product benefits and is further along in the sales funnel.

A structure built on a weak foundation is likely to crumble. A digital marketing program built on an ineffective website will underperform. Use SEO to create a client-centric site based on customer search intent. Your efforts will lay the groundwork for all social, email, and face-to-face sales campaigns to generate better leads, improved brand visibility, and increased sales. 

Contact Digital Strategy Studio today to help you build a solid foundation for your digital marketing efforts.