Here is the punchline right up front.
SEO is a layer of any good marketing strategy.
SEO should never be the entire strategy, but there isn’t a strategy without SEO.
Let’s break this down.
A marketing strategy is the plan that businesses use to reach their marketing goals.
A good marketing strategy involves everything from
- Understanding the target audience
- Analyzing the competition
- Selecting the best channels for your business – these are platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Podcasting, Blogging or TikTok
- Creating engaging content on those platforms
- Defining and tracking the key performance indicators (KPIs)
All of these components work together to form a comprehensive marketing strategy that helps a business achieve its marketing goals.
What are Marketing Goals?
According to Hubspot, A marketing goal is a specific and measurable objective that helps you meet your broader business goals. It can be anything from generating high-quality leads and raising brand awareness to increasing user engagement.
A marketing plan without predefined goals is a waste of time and money.
Goals provide purpose and direction.
Goals define success.
Here are some of the major goals for creating and implementing a good marketing strategy:
- Increase brand awareness.
- Generate high-quality leads.
- Acquire new customers.
- Increase website traffic.
- Establish Industry Authority.
- Increase customer value.
- Boost engagement.
- Increase revenue.
In other words the marketing strategy is the plan to help a business reach their goals, the strategy is the HOW for the GOALS.
What about SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a crucial part of the marketing strategy because it helps businesses reach their goals. SEO helps improve the visibility of a website on Google. Better rankings on Google enables potential customers to find the website. By researching and targeting the right keywords, creating quality content, and optimizing website elements like meta tags and images, companies can improve their website’s ranking and attract more qualified leads.
In short, SEO contributes to every single marketing goal listed above.
SEO increases brand awareness by improving a websites find-ability on Google.
SEO can generate high quality leads because potential customers who search for a product or service are more likely to buy that product or service.
Increasing organic traffic will help reach new customers.
Increasing organic traffic will increase total website traffic.
By implementing a data driven content strategy, businesses will establish industry authority.
By providing value (helpful articles, detailed videos, knowledge base and etc) businesses will increase their customer value.
A site that is full of valuable and binge-able content will boost engagement.
All of this will lead to trust which will lead to more customers which leads to more revenue.
While SEO is a critical part of any marketing strategy, it should never be the only form of marketing that a business does.
The whole (marketing strategy) is always greater than the sum of the parts (individual marketing channels) when SEO is included as one of the channels.
Let’s look at some client examples.
Quick Case Study for a Fine Artist
We have a client who is a fine artist, her marketing goals are to increase brand awareness, to be featured in more gallery exhibits and to sell her art.
She has implemented a marketing strategy that includes social media, specifically Instagram. On Insta she creates videos of her creating art, she has Insta Posts of her finished work and she has Insta Stories that tell the story behind each piece, each Insta Story will link to a full article that is on her website. Her Instagram strategy allows her to reach a wide audience. The critical part of the strategy is that every Insta Video, Post and Story points the audience back to her website.
It is on her website that users can see all of her work, read all of her articles and contact her to purchase art.
As more and more traffic comes to the site from Instagram the more authority Google will give the site. If Google sees that users come to the site and are engaged with it, Google will conclude that the site is valuable and will therefore send more users from Google search to the site. The combination of Social Media and SEO create something bigger and better than either one by itself. The magic happens when the two strategies are combined.
Quick Case Study for a Medical School Advisor
We have a client who teaches nurses how to become a CRNA. Her marketing goals are to increase highly-qualified leads and to acquire new customers.
A key component of her strategy is podcasting. This client creates a new podcast each week. Each episode is posted on her website with detailed show notes, links to outside resources and internal links to other episodes and blogs within her site. Even though users can listen to the podcast from any streaming service she always references the show notes on her website. The podcast allows her to reach a wider audience from iTunes, Spotify, and all of the other streaming services but like the fine artist, she always points listeners back to her website.
It is on her website that users can learn about her program and sign up to become a member.
By producing the podcast and by creating very detailed and searchable show notes, our client is able to reach a wide audience. She is also able to attract more qualified leads and get new customers. It is the combination of podcasting and SEO that allow our client to achieve her goals.
As you think about your Marketing Strategy for 2023, it is crucial that you remember that,
SEO is a part of any good marketing strategy. SEO should never be the whole strategy and there isn’t a strategy if there isn’t SEO.
If you are ready to reach your marketing goals, let’s get started.
