The surprising part for me in recent weeks is that there are many Acquisition Marketers who still doubt that investing in SEO is even worth the effort. And, they have not even given it a try.
In some sense, it’s the “paralysis by analysis” conundrum. As SEO practitioners, we have all been faced with the question of “what’s the ROI?”
In my last article, 10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics, I made the case that tracking SEO success can get messy when you look at attribution tracking, and that you may have to resort to some more basic measurements to prove success.
It is exactly this messy success tracking that makes Acquisition Marketers hesitant to invest in SEO.
The Case For SEO As An Acquisition Vehicle
So, here’s my case for why SEO is a necessary piece of Acquisition Marketing:
A well-executed SEO strategy requires crafting and generating valuable content, promoting that content, and finding ways for trusted resources to link to that content. It takes time to see organic search results.
In this process, the most likely scenario is that “The Rank Hound” will be disappointed, and the “The Small Portfolio Ranker” will begin to have doubts, but may see some positive signs. “The More, The Merrier” will see the breadth of keyword traffic begin to expand, and will be happy to see that progress. But, even “The More, The Merrier” will begin to question if the right tail keywords are bringing in traffic.
However, this entire SEO process is moving the acquisition dial in the right direction!
Acquisition benefits include:
- Purchase Influencing. Quality content that is generated is positively influencing buyer behavior. Whether or not the content is found via a search engine (at the beginning), the content is still pushing website visitors closer to being buyers. By “content”, I don’t just mean written text (which is of course valuable) – great content will take many forms, including video, images, graphical depictions (including infographics), webinars, contests & promotions, local search assets (e.g. Google Places), and many other forms of great, creative, and convincing content.
- Awareness. Visits from long-tail keywords, even if not the best-converting keywords, are building brand awareness, and planting the seed that your site is there for them to come back to. You may see this traffic come back to you in future visits in your analyitcs as “Direct/Bookmark” or search queries for your brand name. But, it was the initial visit, for a very specific phrase that even gave you the opportunity for that second visit.
- Creating A Voice. In order to promote the content, you need a voice. That voice is a combination of social media engagement, PR, and traditional link building. These traffic channels, and communication processes, will be there even when Google changes the search game on us all again. People will be finding you not just via search, but through good-old-fashioned communication. But, you did the groundwork, in part, to improve SEO results.
- Competitive Keywords Will Come To You. Your quest for ranking for the best-converting, and more competitive, keywords will provide results. It will just take more time than many Acquisition Marketers are typically comfortable with. But, without making the investment in organic search, your competitors will keep taking your customers away from you.
As organic search traffic, and traffic from related sources, flows in, Acquisition Marketers can do one of the things they do best – test and optimize the user experience to capture customers and prospects, and build marketing lists to nurture with care.
Every Industry Evolves & Requires Convincing Doubters In Order To Grow
As I was drafting this article, I was bouncing ideas off of a trusted adviser, Mike Schultz, from the Rain Group. Mike’s specialty is sales training.
As I talked about my surprise at still finding so many “doubters” who have not yet invested in SEO, Mike drew an analogy to how even “mature” industries need to be re-introduced to how to sell their own services. He talked about how roughly 20 years ago, law firms began to revolutionize the way they market and sell their services (even though lawyers have been around for centuries).
It became evident, that if a competitive law firm did not engage in more aggressive marketing and demand generation, then not only were they leaving potential business on the table, the perception was that they were behind the curve.
While the SEO industry is far from mature, it is true that the speed of adoption has been at a much more rapid rate than many other marketing channels. In fact, Brian Halligan and the rest of the Hubspot team, have proven how fast a new marketing concept, such as inbound marketing, can take hold.
So, my hope is that the sophisticated, ROI-driven Acquisition Marketers will take note of the broad benefits of SEO, and invest time and money in building organic search as an acquisition channel. Even when ROI measurement is not immediately available.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: In The Trenches
Over the past few weeks, a steady stream of writers and editors have jumped ship from the AOL site Engadget, and on Sunday, it became obvious this mass defection was more than just coincidence. The site’s entire senior staff has joined SB Nation, a media startup focused (for now at least) on the sports world, where they are planning to create a new gadget-oriented site. This news does two things: It reinforces how SB Nation could become a significant player in the media space, and it shines a spotlight on one of the major weaknesses in AOL’s growth plans.
Even before he left AOL, it seemed obvious Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky wasn’t comfortable with the new direction CEO Tim Armstrong was charting, particularly the so-called “AOL Way,” which was revealed in a series of slides from an internal presentation, and involved quotas for page views and a search-driven strategy that screamed “content farm.” The Engadget editor made it clear at the time that this approach would not apply to his site, but it came as no surprise when Senior Writer Paul Miller quit, citing the new AOL directives as a major factor in his departure. Miller said:
It doesn’t take a veteran of the publishing world to realize that AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content. As detailed in the “AOL Way,” and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against.
In a blog post published after the SB Nation news broke this past weekend, Topolsky also took some parting shots in AOL’s direction, saying:
SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam.
Arianna Huffington, who took over control of AOL’s editorial direction shortly after The Huffington Post was acquired for $315 million in February, has said in interviews — including one with a deeply antagonistic New York Times writer in that paper’s Sunday magazine this weekend — that the quota and search-driven strategy outlined in the “AOL Way” document is not the approach she plans to take. She has talked about letting authors be guided by their passions, and AOL has been getting rid of freelancers and hiring more staff writers in what appears to be an attempt to become more professional.
The biggest problem for AOL, however, is that doing this — and moving away from the content-farm approach — is likely to make the company’s content operations a lot more expensive, and that’s not something the cash-strapped former web portal can really afford. And whether Huffington likes it or not, her CEO does seem to see content as just a commodity to wrap advertising around.
The departure of the Engadget staff highlights another problem as well, which is that anyone who achieves a certain profile or status as a writer within AOL is probably going to start looking around for a better deal. This isn’t something that is unique to the former web giant, of course. All content companies suffer from the same kind of problem, since their main assets — the writers or creators of their content — are fungible and can leave at a moment’s notice. But AOL is in a particularly tenuous position because its content-focused strategy is so new, and suspicions about its true motivations (i.e, search-driven content farming) are so high. Firing hundreds of writers, as AOL did recently, also doesn’t really endear you to your staff.
The other interesting aspect of this news is that it clearly marks the rise of SB Nation as a substantial player in the online media space. The company started as a group of hyper-focused sports blogs co-founded by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, and in 2008 added CEO Jim Bankoff — a former AOL executive, and one of the architects of the company’s original acquisition of Engadget. Over the past three years, Bankoff has built a substantial business while staying largely under the radar.
The company recently closed a $10.5-million funding round from heavyweights Khosla Ventures and Accel Partners, and it seems obvious Bankoff plans to use that financing to expand his operations in new areas. Anyone who thought the company was just going to focus on sports and leave the rest of the web-content game to AOL and Yahoo should probably revise their thinking pretty quickly.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
- Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
- How Media Companies Can Compete Online
- The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
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