subject: Search Engine Optimizations Role In Brand Marketing Strategy [print this page] SEO, or search engine optimization, is a crucial component in brand marketing strategy. SEO enables companies to profit from a large market share of the first page of search engine results online and in mobile marketing. SEO increases public brand awareness, increases website activity, generates leads, sales and profits for businesses. The medium is the most targeted medium available to marketers, because it has the undivided attention of consumers who are actively searching for products and services.
How big is SEO and search marketing? According to a February 2010 report on SearchEngineLand, people search on Google 34,000 times per second. That works out to 121 million searches per hour, 3 billion per day.
Chances are in that 3 billion searches per day, someone is looking for what a particular company does. There are tools to find out what keywords people are searching for, and other tools to find out if they are finding that company, how long they stayed on a site, and whether they made a purchase.
Web Traffic is Qualified. Many salespeople will spend hour after hour, making cold calls to unqualified potential customers, nearly all of whom are not interested or able to buy. But visitors to a site have already qualified themselves just by visiting the site in the first place. It means they are interested.
Leads can further qualify themselves by following a call to action that requires them to give their address and phone number, and even checking a box that says they want additional information. This means salespeople can increase their close rate, and save themselves from hours of wasted phone calls.
SEO and Search Marketing are Measurable. Traditional marketing is hard to measure, compared to measuring SEO. Packages like Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics monitor web traffic, pages visited, and even whether visitors made a purchase. Imagine tracking people who came in because of an email newsletter or SEO keyword, all the way through the sales funnel, and into a final purchase.
It is nearly impossible to accurately measure the ROI of a billboard, TV commercial, or even conferences and trade shows. By measuring SEO, it is possible to see within minutes or hours which tactics are working, which are not, and make adjustments accordingly.
SEO is Cost Effective. Traditional marketing and advertising have higher costs than a regular SEO campaign. Not only are there higher startup and execution costs for things like billboards, TV and radio ads, or even print ads, but a lot of money is wasted because those ads are seen by people who are not within the target audience.
That is, if a company sells boat insurance, why would they put up a highway billboard? A large majority of people who drive past it do not own boats, will never own boats, and will never even ride in a boat. The billboard company's selling point is "twenty thousand people drive past this billboard every day," yet fewer than 500 people may own a boat. The advertiser has wasted money by advertising to 19,500 non-boat owners every day, rather than focusing a fraction of that money on their target audience.
This is the problem traditional marketing has trying to reach large numbers in the hopes of reaching those special few who might need their service. SEO, on the other hand, makes it possible so only the target audience boat owners finds the company's website, and only when they need to. Rather than spending $10,000 per month in the hopes 500 boat owners will be ready to buy when they drive by, it is possible to create an SEO campaign to reach the boat owners at the exact time they are ready to buy: the minute they search for "boat insurance" on their favorite search engine.
SEO is a powerful tool, both for winning search engine ranking, and for improving a company's brand image. It is more cost effective than traditional marketing, and can reach a targeted audience. But companies who ignore it do so at their own financial peril.
