When you need SEO and when you don’t
Over the years, Search Engine Optimisation has ended up with a questionable reputation. While there is no doubt that SEO can be a powerful sales and marketing tool, there’s no shortage of people who wasted thousands of pounds on SEO that didn’t work. In this post, I’ll try and explain why SEO can be folly for some while bringing fortune for others.
SEO is about connecting with users
Search Engine Optimisation should be viewed as a form of marketing. There is no doubt that SEO works. The question is, how well will it work in your situation.
SEO aims to connect your website with relevant search engine users. Like any other form of promotion, we need to identify the people we would most like to connect with. The second step is to ask ourselves if we can identify those people based on the search terms they are using?
If you own a local car garage, identifying users you want to reach based on their search terms will probably be fairly straightforward. For example, you would probably want to target people in your local town who need their car serviced. Anyone searching for phrases like “car service” along with your town name is highly likely to fit your target market.
However, what if you have something more obscure. Maybe you have an innovative new cycling product for sale. Your target market is cyclists, but no one will be searching for your product because they don’t know it exists. In this instance, you should be able to think of other cycling related search terms you can use instead.
Just because you can use SEO, doesn’t always mean you should
Using the two examples above, using SEO is probably a no-brainer in the case of the Garage. There are probably only a handful of garages in town. The work involved to make sure you are showing up prominently for relevant search terms is likely to be relatively reasonable.
It might not be so clear cut for the innovative cycling product. Cycling is big business, and there are plenty of big brands all fighting for attention when it comes to search. Depending on the product, you may find the amount of work it would take to compete for relevant search traffic may well eclipse the potential profit you could make in return.
You can’t do it all
Even if you decide that SEO is worth the investment, that doesn’t always mean it is the best investment. You only have a finite pot of money (or finite amount of time) with which to market your business. You need to invest your time and money where it will perform best. Even if SEO would “work” for you, there may be other marketing channels that would perform better.
Better doesn’t always mean most ROI. SEO is normally a longer-term investment compared to many other forms of marketing. So while you may have some resources to invest in marketing today, you may not be able to wait for months to see a return.
Common causes for SEO not working
Missing marketing fundamentals
There are fundamentals to marketing that form the foundation of any promotional campaign. One of those fundamentals is identifying and understanding your target market. Failing to understand who you are trying to reach will undermine any marketing activities, including SEO.
Unrealistic expectations
Another common reason SEO does not deliver is due to unrealistic expectations. SEO is often oversold. It is all too easy to overestimate the amount of traffic you could get, and underestimate the amount of work needed to get it.
When you think you have a good grasp of the amount of work you are going to need to do (or pay someone else to do), work out how much business you would need to generate to cover that cost. Is it realistic to think search engine traffic could generate that amount of new business?
Poor attribution
Another big issue is poor attribution. If you have worked out you just need to land 4 new clients a year to make your SEO worthwhile, how are you going to tell if you have succeeded? It may not be possible to directly attribute new leads to a specific source. In that case, what metrics can you measure that will at least give you a good indication?
This can be a frustrating issue. Your SEO efforts could be working quite nicely, but there is no way to really tell.
Failure to engage with your SEO
Because SEO can appear like a dark art, many people assume they can pay someone else to simply take care of it all. Unfortunately, SEO is not a tick box exercise. More often than not, you will need to engage with your SEO activities, even when you have hired someone else to do it for you. Many aspects of SEO need to be integrated deep within your business. If you don’t engage with these aspects of your SEO, it could undermine your entire investment.
A quick note on this one. Some agencies will take care of everything for you. In fact, some agencies won’t do it any other way. However, expect them to be more expensive and potentially more autonomous in their approach.
Bad / mismatched SEOs
SEO covers a broad spectrum of skills, and while someone may be good at one aspect of SEO, they may not be good at others. If you are looking for someone to help with your SEO, you need to find someone who is good at the things you need. If you need someone to create content for you, you may want to avoid someone who specialises in technical SEO audits.
Like many industries, there are people offering SEO services who simply aren’t that good. There was a point in time where it was extremely easy to start selling SEO services, even if you had no idea what you were doing. Some SEOs can also get stuck using out of date SEO techniques.
SEO is still powerful, in the right situations
Most businesses could benefit from SEO, but that is very different from saying SEO deserves a chunk of your marketing budget. It needs to be compared with all the other ways you can connect your business to your target market. The best solution will probably be a mix of different marketing channels. A good mix for your business may include some SEO, or it may not. As long as you stay focused on understanding your target market, you should be able to gauge if SEO is right for you.
