SEO often lives on its own island.
yet.
2022.
Getting buy-in for SEO investment is already hard enough. But they also face the challenge that many companies are still questioning where they fit in their overall marketing budget.
You’d think we’d figured this out by now.
- Is there a technical side to SEO? absolutely. But is SEO all about the technical stuff? Absolutely not. far cry.
- SEO is not advertising. Most companies include his PPC budget in their overall marketing budget. A client I’ve been working with for several years gets about 60% of their traffic from organic search, but about 7x to 10x he spends on paid search, and that’s how much he spends on paid search. 20% of him. I don’t think this is an unusual case. I think this is most likely the standard.
- The website “thing” is still typically an IT expense, not marketing. However, creating website content may be more suitable for IT, PR, or social (marketing) departments.
SEO has come a long way and established its legitimacy, but it wasn’t until corporate leaders saw SEO as “marketing” that it received due respect for the role it plays in their digital marketing efforts. I think
Until SEO is firmly regarded as a “marketing” function, consider the potential value/ROI of any SEO effort to get this work right and realize the necessary budget to invest the right amount of time/budget I can not do it.
What is marketing?
If you do a Google search, you’ll find definitions of marketing such as:
- “The act or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”
We could stop the discussion here. That’s exactly what her SEO is for. Advertise your company and help sell your products and services, including market (keyword/competitor) research.
What will your SEO efforts for 2022 include?
Everyone has their own SEO approach. Some might say that SEO involves metadata. Some might say “technical”, such as dealing with page speed.
These things are certainly true, but they are small pieces of a comprehensive approach to SEO.
Simply put, SEO is the process of building your business’s web presence and connecting with consumers.
This process may start with keyword research, but even that small task/deliverable is a complex process.
- How would you like your business, its products, and/or its services to be positioned?
- Which competitors do you think are the most aligned with our goals and likely to be the most effective for the keywords you’ve identified?
- From all your analysis, have you identified keywords that seem “very important”, but aren’t there pages or content that are relevant enough to Google and searchers to satisfy your search intent?
- If so, how can you intuitively build new pages/content into your website to provide a better user experience and gain presence in organic search?
- How can I cross-promote (link) content to improve performance (rank)?
Did you notice anything not mentioned?
Anything technical.
SEO is more than just a technical thing
Indeed, there are many examples of people stepping into new SEO engagements and dealing with technical glitches that have become the “things” that are preventing them from succeeding. There are very few instances of them. The common “robots.txt has disallow: /” comes to mind.
The technical component of any new SEO engagement should (or should) include a technical audit. And this is more than just using one tool to report all issues.
However, the technical elements that need to be present in your SEO efforts may include items such as:
- Technical crawling with any number of tools (Semrush, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, etc.).
- A mobile-friendly check to ensure that your page is displaying correctly on multiple devices, loading correctly, content is recognized, and more.
- URL review. If possible, make sure your URL structure matches the keywords you’re targeting on a given page and doesn’t have any quirks that could affect your page’s ranking.
- Regular review.
- page speed.
- schema.
- Using/reviewing JavaScript.
Technical SEO is still important, but it’s definitely not what it was 20 years ago when most websites were hand-coded.
Many commercial content management systems today do a decent job of providing a “search engine friendly” platform.
In many cases, SEO efforts are truly “marketing”.
Based on a lot of marketing research, we are working to adjust the pages/content of our website to address the known searches performed (and the intent of those searches).
Want to rank your “money page”? Of course, if you can manage it, 100% of the time.
But is it the content we often perceive as “what Google/searchers like/want”? Not always.
Google often groups keywords intentionally, grouping them like this:
- Information result (You may need to create some witty content or blog posts to address questions searchers may ask)
- Trading performance (These people are looking to buy/convert something. Are our pages informative and content rich enough?)
- business performance (These people are researching brands and services. Do you have strong category pages?)
SEO engagements spend a lot of time on these “non-technical” things.
Often looking for ways to optimize.
- information architecture.
- Taxonomy.
- content.
- user experience.
- Conversion rate optimization.
- Video content/YouTube.
- local organic presence.
- Items related to online reputation management.
- more.
Then use Google Analytics, other tools and measurements to optimize your efforts towards the specific goals you are trying to achieve.
Ideally, you should be able to address many of the big technical hurdles at the beginning of your SEO engagement. New “things” often emerge that require technical review.
But more than anything else, it is the strategic approach to content that drives SEO engagement, helping clients to better position their websites (and other assets associated with an organic presence) and “including conducting market research.” , promote behavior that promotes the products or services of a business.” “
that is…. marketing.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Mark Jackson is the President and CEO of Vizion Interactive, an agency founded in Dallas, Texas in 2005, offering SEO services, paid media services (search/display/social/video/Amazon), local listings management, and We specialize in conversion rate optimization. Mark is a co-founder of the Dallas-Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association and the Kansas City Search Engine Marketing Association, and has contributed to Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, Pubcon, and the Search Engine Strategies conference.
