SEO: Your Long Term Business Growth Engine

Online Success Requires Balance

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Search engine optimisation takes time to evolve

Just like it takes time for animals and plants to grow, mature and flourish, the organic or natural growth of your websites take time also. Organic growth stands for long term, steady and continual growth.

Major search engines rank websites on the relevance of your content and also continually evaluate your business seriousness which takes time. They continually track the pattern you follow in updating content, the many ‘user-friendly’ features that you keep adding, how other websites do business with you (links) and what do web visitors think about you (blog comments).

This evaluation is a long term process analysis as search engines are careful about indexing only those businesses that are serious about serving their site visitors through fresh content and useful applications and are not bothered about your business net worth.
 
As SEO delivers amongst the best marketing ROI, businesses realise that organic Search Engine Optimisation growth is amongst the most successful long term internet marketing strategies. Consistent SEO efforts not only build traffic but also ensure higher conversions as interested customers start to trust your business.

Organic SEO timing

Timing of content updates for better Search Engine Optimization results is more important than the size of updates. Website Owners need to update their website regularly. It does not pay to update your site in large infrequent content-chunks. Instead you could pile up your content and upload in small pieces regularly – with at least 2-3 days interval between each upload.  This strategy works as search engines are continually monitoring your info-update frequency and generally like to see a steady pattern of continued growth. This is typical of ‘organic life’, as you cannot eat all food in one day and it is healthier to eat small pieces of your favourite food regularly.  While you may not see better Search Engine Optimisation results immediately, after a month or two once the search engines begin to take notice, your rankings will start to improve.

24/7 Returns on SEO investment

The November 2007 B to B Magazine issue states in a well researched article that approximately 80% of all Internet traffic now comes from a search engine.  This data illustrates that any online lead generation effort has to heavily rely on sustained SEO efforts as in any business your brand visibility precedes most customer interaction & engagement, which leads to conversion followed by customer retention. 

Global studies by BtoB Magazine show that 2nd or even 3rd page search result page rankings can increase your site traffic volume by up to 9 times! If your site appears in the Top 10 results (1st page listings) it could easily translate into additional 6-fold increase in your web-traffic! This B to B study also found that that the Top 10 rankings, on average increased sales by 42% in the first month of successful SEO results (takes at least 3 months to reach this), and 100% for the 2nd month.

Clearly organic SEO does make a huge difference in how successful your internet marketing is in growing your business revenues. Popular search marketing efforts i.e. SEO or PPC are not “quick fix” measures. Instead, they are both valuable assets of a well coordinated internet marketing mix.

Deployed in conjunction, the two could return better results, as PPC speeds up brand exposure while Search Engine Optimisation can build a steady brand-satisfaction and a viable revenue stream  with the marketing costs amortised over time.

Here’s your SEO marketing checklist:

  • -Have a workable SEO strategy for delivering 3 year return: use professional services provider to do regular enhancements and thorough website-SEO reality check. Then benchmark this data with the progress of your competition and your own customers’ changing consumer behaviour.
  • - Tweak SEO-PPC collaboration strategies: use web-analytics data to measure revenue-effectiveness of different SEO and PPC initiatives.
  • Based on you short term business objective (promoting a new product launch) and long term goals (brand leader) you could tweak the SEO and PPC investments for better results in the long run.
  • - Compare SEO investments with other offline marketing spends: after your  results start kicking in after 4 months, compare the Search Engine Optimisation investment against other offline marketing initiatives like newspaper ads. Like millions of business owners you will discover returns do score over offline marketing and the gap widens with time. You could also use innovations to point customers to offline ads and vice versa for better synergies.
  • - SEO scores over Yellow Page ads: while search engines quickly deliver your fresh Search Engine Optimised enhanced content to your target audience, Yellow Pages are cumbersome to search and often have obsolete content. With search pioneers like Google offering a tele-call facility to local search results, paid yellow page ads are struggling to keep pace with the unrivalled benefits of SEO. Every business and industry is different so to gain accurate data on this subject simply analyse your website referral traffic and check how many clicks you are receiving from your Yellow Pages spend versus Google or other search engines.

Posted on December 23, 2008

What is your organic cost per click? Are your competitors paying more than you for clicks? Is your website performing at 100%?