In today’s digital world, the internet is at the heart of everything we do. Watching your favorite sports team? Stream the game online! Miss your friends back home? Jump in a chat room! Homework due? Hop online to MySnhu and get it done!
Almost anything you would have to do; you can now do online. Perhaps then it should not be surprising that when consumers need to buy something, more often than not- they turn to the internet. We now see Over 63% of shopping occasions now start online. Where the revenue goes the marketers follow! Unsurprisingly, digital marketing has grown in scale with the online shopping boom. Experts are projecting the digital marketing industry to be worth $460 Billion by the end of 2022. Digital marketing is made up of email, social media, mobile apps and more. However, there is another piece of digital marketing that up until fairly recently was flying under the radar…
Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
With so many shopping occasions starting online (usually with a Google search), it makes sense that the SEO market would have grown in recent years. Grown it has! The SEO market is expected to reach $50 Billion dollars by the end of this year. As companies desperately seek a competitive advantage, more and more companies are investing in SEO to ensure their company’s website is the first to come up on that Google feed! A 2021 CMO survey found that 74% of companies are now investing in SEO. Nowhere is this more prominent then in the Enterprise space, where big companies have the big marketing budgets to match. Pictured below is a sample breakdown of what a marketing budget might look like with SEO taken into consideration.
While the flow of money and growth of the SEO market shows it is now a valued tool, let’s take a step back and find out what all this hype is about.
What is SEO?
To phrase it simply, SEO is a process whereby companies make improvements to their website that will increase the visibility of it on search engines (mainly Google) when the searcher looks up products or services that closely relate to your company’s offerings. As an example…Nike leverages SEO to ensure when someone searches “basketball shoes” in google, the link to their website will be appear at the top of the page before any of their competitors like Adidas or Under Armor.
It’s easy to see the big picture benefits of being the first option a consumer will come across when doing a product search online! However, marketers will always need to know the costs and time it will take to reach ROI to help justify the investment in a service like SEO.
ROI. How much? When?
When it comes to achieving the desired results with SEO, patience is a virtue. Often times it may take 4-6 months to recognize the impact of SEO on your business, and that’s if you are using less competitive keywords. For companies in highly competitive industries at the enterprise level, you can expect to wait even longer (6-12 months) before seeing an ROI with SEO. While this may seem like a long time, the results can be worth the wait. Companies who leverage SEO effectively will find this service can help make serious headway in clawing back market share from competitors. Let’s discuss…
SEO and Market Share
Documented benefits of SEO include (but aren’t limited to):
- Increase in the amount of people you reach.
- Improving engagement rates.
- Improving your content marketing.
One aspect these benefits all have in common? They’ll all help you win market share over your competition. Here’s how…
Increasing your reach will spike your company’s brand awareness. If more people are aware of your company’s existence, you’re already taking steps to increasing your market share. People do not typically buy from companies they don’t know. To win market share over your peers it is important to be seen, be heard, and be recognized. An effective SEO strategy will positively impact all of those factors.
Engagement rates are a carefully measured metric for all marketers, and for good reason. Solid engagement rates have long been known to have a positive effect on a company’s credibility and visibility. Being perceived as credible in the eyes of a consumer is hugely important when battling rival companies for market share. Consumers like to buy from companies they know and trust. Boosting your engagement rate will help with this!
Content Marketing is expensive. In fact, research shows that on average companies spend over a quarter of their marketing budget on content marketing. For good reason, content marketing is a huge part of branding and telling your company’s story. Effective branding has a direct impact on market share as it’s a key factor in generating brand recognition and awareness. SEO will help optimize your content and give it as much visibility as possible. In short, SEO will take your content further then it’s ever gone before!
In summary
SEO is no longer a “nice to have” or premium type service. It is becoming a cornerstone of any marketing strategy and campaign, for the reasons I have touched on above. Relevancy of SEO will only become more apparent as our world becomes increasingly digital and intertwined with the internet. If increasing your market share is a goal for you and your company, SEO is a great place to start.
Category: SEO, Social Media Marketing 101