Does SEO Offer Short-Term Value?

For those of you who are familiar with marketing, especially search engine optimization, you know that there’s no such thing as an overnight success story. SEO takes time and you need to be able to develop it the right way if you are going to be able to have a campaign that supports your business for years. When you look at your competitors, especially those who are ranked on page one of Google you have to understand that they put in the time, effort, content and money to produce those results. They didn’t take shortcuts; they didn’t demand results from their marketing team within the same month and they understood the process and trusted it.

Today, their business sees high amounts of quality traffic every day because of their presence on Google. Even better, if their traffic goes up it does not cost them anything extra. SEO Has some of the highest conversion rates in all of digital marketing and on top of that you are able to take a top page place from one of your competitors giving yourself valuable real estate on the world’s top search engines. You already know the value that comes with search engine optimization, but your reluctance is due to the time frame it requires. Any respectable marketing agency will tell you that a search campaign requires 3 to 9 months to generate top page rankings depending on the quality of your site, the competitiveness of the keywords you’re targeting add more.

However, what you may not be aware of is that there are also short-term advantages to adding search engine optimization to your marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at some of these advantages that your company will notice within the first month or two.

• Improved reputation: We all know the importance of reviews and ratings when people look at your company. But what about content? Are people able to find relative and recent content that shows your company is doing great things? If there’s nothing written about your company in years and you have poor ratings, then why would anybody want to buy from you?
• Higher conversion rates for other marketing services: Keeping with this point, imagine someone received an email from you about a big sale you are having. Now think about this consumer for a minute, they’ve never heard of you, they’ve never been to your site, they never shopped with you and they have no idea if they can trust you. Let’s imagine for a minute that your email hit the right person at the right time, and they are interested in buying from you. One of the first things they’re going to do is go to Google to research your business. The first step of SEO is strengthening your businesses presence on Google so that other marketing efforts benefit from it.
• Easier for consumers to find your brand: As consumers go to search engines to find products and services, they want they are starting to get more detailed in their search. For example, rather than searching for a plumber On Google, someone will search for a plumber who is available on weekends in their area. We refer to this in the business as a long-tail keyword. It is more specific and while it does have a lower search volume, it comes with higher conversion rates because the consumer is less likely to be looking for information and more likely to be looking to take an action.
• Protection from competitors: As you start to build up your online marketing , generating quality traffic, building a social media following, give me more people to sign up for emails and promotions and so forth, your competitors will start to try to take advantage of this by mimicking what you’re doing or utilizing your name as much as they can. Without a strong SEO strategy in place, they will be able to do it easily.

Yes, SEO Is a long-term game that requires real commitment from you. However, that doesn’t mean that you cannot take advantage of some of the short-term benefits that it will provide you.