Why is SEO so important?
Valuing a website in terms of what advertising it can attract and sustain is no longer the benchmark or performance indicator; what is certainly more important is what the site does to acquire and retain new customers and retain existing customers.
As search engines have several billion pages that are available on the world-wide web, it is necessary to use specialized techniques to match your web page with the algorithms and ranking criteria that such engines use, thereby improving the chance of catching the limited attention span of the visitor.
Then you have about 2 seconds to help them decide to stay or go. Not much time! Which is why every word on the page, every picture, needs to count.
What Is Your SEO Plan?
The first step that advertisers and marketing professionals need to take in order to apply optimization techniques to a website that will achieve their goals is to articulate the objective and characterize the visitor, the desired visitor experience, and the proposed outcomes.
Your SEO optimization strategy will evolve as a result of this plan, since it will determine which tactics will be of most use in achieving the plan.
Then you have to decide what your marketing budget is, both in terms of time allocated, and dollars available. Then there is time frame. If you are trying to get your business off the ground quickly, in order to generate leads, with a view to later sales, SEO will not be as crucial as PPC and email lead generation and lead management and marketing.
However, it is something you need to keep in mind and integrate as much as possible into any content which you put up on your site.
Then there are linking programs and directory listings. Again, these will only cost money if you outsource them. However, these activities, like SEO, can eat up a lot of time if you don’t focus on what you would like your end result to be.
The key metrics to your SEO program will be to assess the ROI it delivers: marketing dollars, vis-à-vis measurable benefits to the organization in terms of traffic, leads and sales.
With PPC, it is easy to track these. While there is some software that can help with this for SEO, you will need to be prepared to be patient to start seeing results.
