As you look at your overall marketing strategy, you may be wondering, “where does SEO fit into all this?” Organic search, as you probably know, can be one of the most efficient and effective marketing channels at your disposal. However, on its own, it is not going to be able to provide the consistent and impactful results that we are all looking for. That’s why it’s important to understand what other strategies you need to use in conjunction with SEO to build a comprehensive marketing strategy that doesn’t just increase your brand’s visibility but can convert leads and generate profit.
When SaaS marketers think of SEO, we often think about the importance of building out pages and content that can attract people. At Demandwell, we call this performance content. After all, isn’t the goal of SEO to get more eyes on our website? While performance content is a crucial element of a content marketing strategy, you do need other kinds of content. Building quality or premium content is an important element of any content marketing plan that can also support SEO goals and is important for the overall success of your marketing efforts. For instance, recycling an eBook or videos from a quality blog post can improve the value you provide in your SEO performance content. If site visitors can find the value they were looking for, no matter which page they get this value from, they are more likely to convert into leads.
The real ROI of generating organic traffic comes when that traffic is converted, which is why we need to do more than just focus on keyword-heavy SEO performance content. Quality written content is useful to demonstrate your brand’s thought leadership which is both integral for branding, and the assets created from your quality blog content can be re-used to boost your SEO performance content even further.
Taking a step back, there is a lot more than content marketing that affects SEO. Brand is a powerful force that can improve SEO performance. It’s important to attend events, build sponsorship relationships, and do other activities like that to get your brand recognized in your industry. One massive boost this can create for SEO performance is endorsements. In other words, if other websites mention your brand and link back to pages on your website, then they are essentially endorsing your content and adding authority to your website within your industry. Endorsements can have a massive positive impact on SEO performance by signaling to search engines that people trust your content and find your content valuable. The other more direct impact that brand can have on your SEO performance is increasing branded search traffic to your website.
Partnerships are one way to get the most out of your SEO program. You may notice customer review sites rank at the top of a lot of the keywords you care about. Instead of trying to outrank a customer review site, you may decide it’s easier to partner with these sites. Work to improve your reviews on these sites, and web traffic directed to customer review sites can be led straight to your website. This way, you do not have to compete against review sites every time they outrank you for an important keyword.
One last way that SEO impacts your marketing strategy is with paid search. When trying to understand SEO and paid search in tandem, you need to know when a keyword is better for SEO or paid search. In a nutshell, it makes sense to pay for ads if the keywords are high-intent and can produce a positive ROI, especially if you aren’t ranking for those keywords yet with organic search results. For high-funnel keywords, it doesn’t make sense to expect a positive ROI with paid ads since the web traffic is going to be low-intent and less educated about different solutions. Therefore, these are great keywords to target with SEO to capture that audience without losing money on ad spending. In some cases, it makes sense to bid on keywords where you’re ranking in the top three. Whether it’s branded terms or high-converting keywords, in these cases you want to be occupying as much real estate as possible at the top of search results.
As you can see, SEO is important for your content strategy and can be affected by several other channels in your marketing strategy. You can maximize the impact of your SEO program through branding, partnerships, and paid search. By combining SEO with other marketing activities, you not only boost your organic traffic but also generate more revenue and grow your business.
