The Power of SEO – Beth Kempster
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a commonly used channel in digital marketing. Most marketing managers will have an SEO and Pay-per-click (PPC) budget earmarked every year with the aim to increase online leads or revenue.
Sometimes though, SEO can feel like an afterthought. You’ll often hear questions such as “is that article optimised for SEO?” or “will the new website be SEO friendly?”.
And in fact, 5-10 years ago that could be enough to rank on page one. Throw a few keywords onto a blog post or launch a site with minimal errors and watch as the rankings climb.
Now though, there’s more competition than ever…
Did you know that today there are over 1.1 billion websites online? That’s nearly double the number from 10 years ago, so competition for being on page 1 of Google has skyrocketed.
Because of such heavy competition, websites need to ensure they’re providing the absolute best experience (sometimes globally) for the user. Often, that means they’re aiming to be the top website of 10-500 million other websites.
For example, the keyword “kyc software” (a B2B tool to verify a customer’s identity) has over 15 million results. Or “b2b sales leads” has over 36,600,000 websites listed on Google.
Is it worth being on the top page of Google anymore?
As we’ve seen over recent years, Google has been putting more and more ads on their search engine results page. So why bother with organic rankings, everyone is just clicking on ads now right?
Wrong.
A 2024 study by SparkToro found that 75% of users click on an organic listing, 24% go to a Google product (imagery, youtube, maps etc) and only 1% will actually click on an ad. So organic listings are likely to yield much more traffic than ads.
Another study that interviewed marketing managers across europe found that 60% of marketing managers believed their best quality leads came from SEO. So, not only does an organic listing receive better click-through rates than their ad counterparts, but they also tend to attract better quality leads overall.
What other benefits can SEO bring?
We know that organic listings are still what the majority of users click on. We also know that SEO tends to bring in a higher quality of leads compared to other channels.
But how else can SEO benefit a company?
For SEO to work, it considers every aspect of the visitor’s experience. SEO tasks range from improving the quality of information provided to cleaning up any errors. Even if you don’t rank 1st for your chosen keyword straight away, there’s often changes happening to the site that benefit all your other digital channels.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the other benefits that SEO brings to your site:
- User Experience
Google has confirmed that one of the top ranking factors for any site is the user experience. But what exactly defines a good user experience? That’s debatable, and different search intentions will need different experiences.
For example, if I’m searching for “first time buyer mortgage calculator” I’ll want a page that shows me a big calculator straight away, where I simply input my figures and see a result straight away.
Whereas, if I’m searching for “the best horror movies that came out in 2024”, I’d probably prefer to see a long list format with a high number of reviews attached to each one to verify the validity of the results.
A good SEO team will be able to assess hundreds of keywords and recommend (and even help to build) specific pages and experiences for your customers that provide a positive experience. This means that they’re more likely to convert whether they came in via SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing or any other digital channel.
- Content Clarity
I’ve mentioned keywords throughout this article because they are central to any SEO strategy. Once the best keywords are picked, your SEO team will decide what page is best suited to each keyword. This is often called keyword mapping.
Then, an SEO-trained copywriter will rewrite that page, making sure that it covers all the relevant information surrounding your keyword, while removing any information that feels unnecessary or not relevant to the focus topic of the page.
A common misconception is that an SEO-optimised article will be long winded, often 1,000+ words long. But, in reality, Google will prioritise the most useful content.
Sometimes, only 200 words are needed to answer a query. E.g. “How long to scramble eggs” doesn’t need a 2,000 word essay so Google will prioritise a page where the answer can be scanned in under 1 second. Whereas “The history of Shakespeare” would benefit more from a longer format.
Once optimised, your SEO content should feel clear, useful, unique and relevant to your audience. Better content that I can use across all channels as well as more leads? Yes please.
- Technical Support
I’ll keep this section short, as I know technical chat can be boring to some, but it certainly has its place in any SEO strategy. An SEO strategy should highlight any technical issues on the site. We often find that most clients aren’t aware of the issues we raise.
A technical issue can range from anything from a broken link or image to a slow checkout process. An SEO expert can clear up these issues and improve the overall site performance, meaning your web visitors may have a better online experience compared to competitors.
- Longevity and ROI
As you’re probably aware, SEO can take some time to build up. Writing and building new content, clearing up errors and building backlinks can take months of strategising, outreach and sign offs. That’s why marketing managers will often have a PPC-heavy strategy to start with, with the hopes of pulling back on their paid ad budget once SEO begins to increase.
However, one benefit of SEO is that once a page has reached page no.1, it often maintains that position for months, sometimes even years. It does depend on the industry, as some are more competitive than others, but generally we’ve had clients that will hold a page 1 position for 6 months to a year and onwards. This means that once you’re happy with a keyword position, your SEO team can move on to working on the next batch of keywords, and the next and the next.
After some time, even though your budget with an SEO agency hasn’t increased, you’re seeing 5x-10x better returns, as more and more keywords are visible in the search results. Hooray!
Conclusion
SEO really is a digital marketing superpower. We know that most people still click on organic listings. We know that the people who do click on organic listings are typically higher quality leads. And, we also know that doing SEO has many benefits that improve the entire site experience.
So, focus more on your SEO efforts and watch your results improve across the board!
Written by
Beth Kempster
Co-Director, alumi marketing
