A successful SEO strategy can provide great long-term ROI for businesses. Whether you’re looking to hire an internal expert, or you want to work with an external SEO agency, there are a few things to consider to help you determine if SEO is right for your business.
What are your business goals?
Your business goals will help to determine which marketing channel you should invest in. Make sure your business has clear goals and objectives set out before you get stuck into an SEO strategy.
The goals SEO can help with:
- Improving the visibility of your website, so that more people can find you on Organic search results
- Driving quality leads to your website and increasing traffic
- Capturing prospecting customers at the top of the funnel, with informational content
- Improving the experience users have on your website, to improve conversion rate
All of the above can help you achieve commercial goals. Whether it’s to increase qualified leads or improve sales, SEO can boost your performance and help to achieve business KPIs.
Do you have the time and budget?
Is your business able to invest enough time? SEO is a long-term strategy, sometimes it takes a while to see the ROI. So, your business needs to ideally commit for at least 6-12 months. SEO should be a continuous strategy that will help you boost results over time, not a quick fix.
What are your internal capabilities and limitations?
Quite often, an SEO agency will provide hands-on support with implementing site-wide optimisations based on their recommendations. However, this is not always the case, especially if the changes are required at the back end by the developer. If your website is hosted on a CMS (central management system) that is restrictive of how much can be changed, then sometimes this makes implementing SEO recommendations difficult.
If your business also has lots of teams to go through in order to get onsite changes approved, then this can cause delays to your organic search campaigns, which could limit your performance growth.
Before you jump into any SEO work, it’s worth gaining a good understanding of what your CMS capabilities are and check with internal teams to make sure the SEO recommendations can actually be implemented. This will avoid problems further down the line and prevent time from being spend/wasted in the wrong places.
Who’s your audience?
Understanding your audience and their behaviours is essential before you roll out an SEO strategy. Is your audience actively searching on Google? How do new people find your brand? Who is it you’re trying to reach?
The answer to these questions will determine if SEO is right for your marketing strategy.
Understanding where you audience is most present, will also help you prioritise and budget your marketing efforts accordingly. For example, if you’re a DTC brand and your target audience is actively searching on Google for the products you sell, then you’ll need to implement an effective SEO strategy to capitalise on this opportunity.
In most cases, if the end goal is to get people onto your website, then SEO is essential. Even if your primary channel for driving traffic is not organic search, making sure your website is technically strong, and offers a good user experience will ultimately help your business achieve its goals.
What are your competitors doing?
In order to be a marker leader, you need to make sure your brand is present in the same spaces as your rivals. Are they ranking in the top organic positions on Google? If the answer is yes, then SEO should definitely be part of your overall marketing strategy.
Ultimately, every business is different and will have unique goals. But, in a digital-first world, it’s more important than ever to get your brand seen across all channels.
