Companies spend large marketing budgets on online advertising in order to drive conversions and generate a return on investment. Popular PPC (pay-per-click) channels include Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Marktplaats AdMarkt. The major risk here is becoming dependent on a constant stream of advertising; if you reduce your advertising spend, it immediately has a major impact on business operations.
By using SEO for your business, you can ensure a healthy balance between paid and organic channels. In this article, you’ll learn about the added value of search engine optimization for your marketing strategy.
By focusing on SEO, you’re investing in your business’s visibility in search engines. It’s important for every business to invest in long-term returns, and SEO is a perfect example of such an investment. By investing in SEO (long term) and PPC channels (short term), you ensure a healthy marketing mix.
SEO isn’t a quick fix for getting more traffic and conversions; it doesn’t deliver results overnight. When you rank well in search results, you’ll attract more relevant visitors and conversions over the long term. Plus, if you rank high in the search results, it’s much easier to maintain that position.
If you continue to invest in online advertising and your business generates a lot of conversions through it, this can get quite expensive. CPCs (cost per click) continue to rise every year due to growing competition across various online marketing channels. High CPCs will eat into your margin and, consequently, your profit. If your online marketing budget doesn’t keep pace, you’ll generate fewer conversions.
SEO helps you strike a balance between the expenses of your online marketing strategy and your CPAs (cost per conversion). SEO costs are much less susceptible to market forces, which play a significant role in PPC channels. Furthermore, based on the data from your PPC channels, you can make informed decisions about your SEO strategy.
This way, you can focus more attention and energy on products and pages that convert well, so that these pages rank highly in search results. This leads to valuable conversions and relevant visitors over the long term.
When you invest in SEO, it’s important to focus on all the fundamentals of SEO: technical aspects, content, and authority. Make sure your investment is well-balanced, and develop a well-thought-out SEO strategy in advance.
Your website’s technical aspects form the foundation of good search visibility and contribute to higher conversion rates. With technical SEO, you optimize your website’s loading speed, ensure that crawlers can properly access all pages, and ensure a solid page structure.
At the start of your SEO project, conduct a thorough technical analysis of your website, prioritize all the action items that result from it, and fix any technical SEO errors. This will help you identify the optimizations needed for your website and lay a rock-solid foundation for improved and enhanced discoverability.
Google’s goal is to provide the best user experience for its visitors. SEO is all about creating a good website with valuable content.
When your website features high-quality content with information that’s relevant to your visitors, Google will recognize this, leading to higher search rankings and valuable visitors. Visitors will also view your website as an authority in your field, which in turn leads to more conversions. So get started with content marketing by creating unique content that’s truly tailored to your target audience.
Using tools like the Google Keyword Planner or alternatives to the Google Keyword Planner, you can easily find search terms that your target audience uses. Incorporate these search terms into your content, HTML headings, meta title, and meta description.
Tip: Easily check all your HTML headings with our HTML heading checker.
Once you’ve got your technical aspects and content in order, it’s important to work on building your website’s authority. You can increase your authority through link building and a solid internal linking structure. If you have multiple relevant pages, it’s important to include internal links between them.
This allows Google to recognize the connections between pages, passes on SEO authority to your page, and shows that you are an authority on the linked topics.
By focusing on high-quality backlinks, you build external SEO authority. You can acquire high-quality backlinks through guest blogging, press releases, and social media content. Internal links and link building are key components for showing Google that you’re an authority in your field. When you establish strong authority, this is rewarded with higher rankings in search results.
SEO offers great opportunities to achieve long-term returns as part of your marketing strategy. With SEO, you’re less reliant on PPC channels and can distribute your marketing budget in a sustainable way. SEO ensures a good balance between paid and organic channels.
It is therefore important for every business to incorporate SEO into its marketing strategy so that you can build your business in a sustainable way.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive for results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has built an extensive body of knowledge spanning technical SEO to complex site migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help businesses achieve sustainable online growth.
His academic background in information science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in natural language processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about visibility in search engines, it’s about sharing knowledge and guiding businesses toward sustainable online success. That mission also led him to write a Dutch book about GEO.