The Danger of SEO Tunnel Vision
Although search engine optimization is a useful marketing activity, it is only one among many. When companies spend too much time, attention and money on SEO they may neglect other marketing activities with the potential to deliver equal or better results. Small firms are especially vulnerable to this trap because of their limited resources.
To make matters worse, some of the marketing activities SEO-obsessed firms neglect are critical for successful SEO. When it comes to developing an Internet marketing plan, it's seldom an either-or proposition; more and more, marketing activities are interdependent and must be orchestrated to maximize results. Here are a few examples of how this plays out, and how self-defeating SEO tunnel vision can be.
Lots of Traffic and No Leads
SEO is all about driving qualified traffic to a company site, and the happiness of SEO-obsessed firms rises and falls with their monthly traffic reports. But traffic -- even qualified traffic -- has little value unless it generates leads and orders. And while few business owners would argue with that statement, few of them match their SEO investment with a conversion optimization investment.
On the front end, a site designed for conversion offers users several enticing ways to take the next step in the business relationship. On the back end, the site tracks lead sources, so marketers can see which of their marketing activities are delivering the best return. Many companies want to rank #1 for a particular search term. What they should want is to rank #1 for conversions for a bunch of search terms.
Conversion optimization is complicated and requires great skill. However, if your marketing doesn't have it, your SEO ROI will suffer greatly.
Content that Drives Business Away
Content marketing is the latest and greatest trend going, and is indeed a terrific way to increase brand awareness, brand affinity, thought leadership, leads and referrals. A very strong side benefit of content marketing is SEO enhancement. When a firm publishes content offsite, it creates a lot of links back to its own site, elevating its authority and search visibility on Google.
Unfortunately, a lot of what passes for content marketing is really content driven by an outdated, churn-and-burn, SEO-obsessed mindset. Back in the day, SEOs cranked out tons of meaningless drivel on press release sites, blogs and article banks, purely in order to create links and cover a plethora of keywords.
While this approach to SEO worked, Google didn't like it. Nowadays, Google has figured out how to ignore or even penalize garbage content, but surprisingly, it still exists, mainly because of an SEO stampede to generate links. The problem has gotten so bad that crap content is widely seen as "the single biggest threat to content marketing." (See this popular slide show on crap content for the frightening details.)
If a firm approaches content creation with a singular view toward SEO, it will fail. Today, content must appeal to humans first and search engines second -- not only because it makes sense, but because this is the way Google wants it. In order to rank (let alone drive leads and sales), content must be creative, compelling, relevant, authoritative, engaging and actionable. It's a tall order, and like conversion optimization, requires great skill and effort.
Beating a Dead Horse, Ignoring Your Triple Crown Winner
As I said at the beginning, SEO is good stuff ... but what if there's better stuff? The fact is, SEO is not always the best Internet marketing option. For small firms, budgets are not always big enough to compete, especially in tough niches like financial services and recruiting. In some niches and/or geographies, there simply isn't enough search traffic to justify a program.
Whatever the contours of your landscape, it makes sense to consider all of your options. As difficult a pill to swallow as it may be, you could be better off giving up ground on rankings and shifting attention to something else. Email marketing is widely successful in any number of industries; PPC (pay-per-click advertising) provides instant search visibility; content marketing, as earlier touched on, has great potential for a number of objectives. There's a lot to choose from.
How to Break Free of the Tunnel
If you want to escape the SEO tunnel, remember to test and not dabble in other marketing activities.
Testing is planned, budgeted for, conducted for a fixed and adequate period of time, and measured.
Dabbling is done on a whim, bankrolled out of petty cash, conducted until attention wanders off, and is evaluated "by feel."
Dabbling almost always disappoints. Testing often leads to results that will (pleasantly) surprise you!
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