Business owners, particularly small business owners, are constantly looking for the most effective marketing efforts to fuel their business growth. Surprisingly Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is rarely at the top of the list of the efforts to consider. In this post we will discuss the importance of focusing on search engine optimization for marketing efforts and why it’s important to work with an SEO Consulting Firm.
Search Engines Bring Customers that Intend to Buy
First off, what is intent-based marketing? Intent-based marketing is a marketing effort for a product or service where the consumer may have been either explicitly or implicitly conveyed their intent to buy. To illustrate, let’s say you are searching for a “purple iPhone 12” on Google. While you haven’t explicitly stated that you want to buy a purple iPhone 12, there’s a good chance you are. Other search phrases like “iPhone 12 for sale” and other terminology like that explicitly state that you are looking to buy.
Marketing through an intent-based channel like a search engine to consumer’s usually produces a better ROI because of the absence of need to create awareness about a product or service in the consumer’s mind before promoting it. Compare that iPhone 12 search example to a Facebook feed ad. The marketer must first position the ad in front of people who they deem has qualified and hopes that you stop what you’re doing on Facebook and click on their ad.
Search engines provide something truly special and generate higher quality leads at a larger quantity. The creepy factor of this form of advertising is almost nonexistent because the user is inputting their search and is expecting a response back.
Your SEO Efforts Compound Over Time
We have often compared a customer’s website and SEO efforts to building/owning a house. While the initial investment may be more than a set of boost posts on social media, investing in your online presence through a website and enhancing divisibility of it through SEO is something that is more long lasting. The content you create, the enhancements you make to the load time of your site, all these things grow and compound over time to produce a strong marketing arsenal for you. If you keep up with your website and keep it fresh, you see that it becomes easier and easier to generate leads with less continuous effort.
It’s Cheaper Than Social Media
The allure of social media for marketers has been twofold: #1 there’s a lot of people using these platforms and #2 ads on social media platforms are cheap. However, the concept of “cheap” is relative to what you are comparing it to. Social media is simply not comparable to search. The only thing you have control over in social media is your social media page, but the only way to guarantee visibility of these posts is to have users directly visit your page. Content you post can organically show up in a social media user’s feed, but that space is competing with friends and family posts along with other pages that user follows. You can run ads to increase the chances of the visibility of your content, which is where many social media marketers end up due to the fleeting nature of creating a following on social media.
Ads on both social media and within search engines are a shortcut to get direct access to audiences without the investment of building a website/app and cultivating this platform. A few years back, social media ads were so cheap from a cost per click standpoint that you could buy 10 to 20 times more clicks from social media than what you could buy from search ads. The reason for that cost difference is that a non-intent-based advertising platform like Facebook generates a significantly higher number of unqualified clicks. Having prices low enough to compensate for the fundamental differences between these two distinct types of marketing helped cement Facebook as a viable marketing option.
In many verticals, this is simply no longer true. The cost per click on social media is now comparable to the cost per click of a search ad. This means that in these situations, a social media ad can have a cost per lead of ten times higher than search ads. What’s important to note is that organic search results can generate ten times higher than a search ad. The key takeaway of this is not to show the price differences between social media ads and search ads, it’s to show how search is a far better investment and will prove to be less costly overall. If cost is a factor, search advertising is a better place to start than social media ads.
Conclusion
It’s important to invest into your own online platform. This is where you’ll have the most control over how best to communicate to your audience without having to deal with the fluctuating costs of online advertisements. Our first step is to set up a consultation to go through your current marketing efforts and how to strategically position yourself for growth moving forward.
