Beware SEO based approaches promising the earth.
There seems to be a ground swell emerging that SEO based approaches are a panacea for marketing in general. Pushing the customer to one side in favour of a chase for rankings.
Despite warnings about the dangers of guest blogging with links, many companies are still interested in using this form of content marketing to boost SEO. It does make sense. It’s always been difficult to measure ROI on marketing. Just because a certain amount of people see a billboard or an advert doesn’t guarantee you’ll see a boost in sales.
SEO provides a result. It’s easier to measure in terms of a number, a position on a Google search or an improvement in a keyword. But the reality is that using only SEO as a measure of ROI is the equivalent of marketing snake oil.
It’s great if you’re on the top ten Google results for a certain search term. That does put you in the face of a lot of customers who wouldn’t otherwise know about you. But it’s not everything. It’s not building an audience. It’s not building a brand. What we encourage our clients to understand is that they don’t just need to focus on boosting their ranks in search engines, but building an audience behind their brand.
Generating a boost in search engine results is no guarantee that there’s an audience out there that knows enough about you to buy. SEO is one part of building a better website that educates potential consumers effectively – but it is not marketing in and of itself.
An effective digital marketing agency must first and foremost be about building audiences, not just the raw data of a search engine ranking. You don’t just want raw visitors to your website, you want awareness. That can’t always be measured with precise numbers. Any marketer that is focused purely on SEO might be able to show results in the form of a boost in your rankings for keywords, but are they really influencing purchasing decisions?
If audience building is what you’re after, have a chat with us. Call DVO at 020 3771 2461 or send us an email at [email protected]. Let’s talk on twitter, we love a good chat @DVOagency.
