SEO Works Best As Part Of A Digital Marketing Strategy

• Posted by Jordan
• 20 January 2012
• SEO

SEO has probably been one of the biggest growing areas in marketing over the past 10 years - the value of being able to rank #1 for a search term which gets over 100,000 searches a month is phenomenal.  But with the link becoming less and less of a factor, SEO now needs to integrate into the wider area of digital marketing by being coordinated with other areas of online marketing, such as viral marketing or pay per click advertising.

The "media multiplier effect" shows that by combining one or more promotional methods you create synergy.  The traditional example of this is if you were to combine direct mail with telesales - isolated direct mail may product a response rate of 0.5% and telesales perhaps 2% - but when combined and coordinated both get an increase of 20%, so the response rates are likely to increase to 0.6% for direct mail and 2.4% for telesales.  This is why using SEO in isolation is wasting a huge opportunity.

So how do we apply this marketing phenomenon to online marketing?  Simple.  One example is the use of display ads such as the Google AdWords content network - by placing ads on here you generate awareness and it increases trust - often display ads such as this generate generic demand - so for example, someone may be looking on holiday sites when they see an ad for holidays in Portugal run by Thomson - instead of going to the Thomson site they decide to search for holidays in Portugal.  The Thomson site, with the help of SEO, should then rank for that term and as a result they should see an uplift in response rates compared to their competitors for that search term.

There are endless number of combinations - for example SEO with Facebook likes, you visit a page, you find a friend has "liked" the product or service, so you are more likely to buy.

This is going to become increasingly important over the next few years, so if you aren't planning and coordinating your online marketing, then you really need to start.

This was a guest post by David Whitehouse, a marketing consultant from Ripon, North Yorkshire.