It Pays to Start SEO Right Away

by mroichamps

If they can find you they will come, know your customers are looking for you today. Marketing Return on Investment (MROI) champions know Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is your number one marketing tool to command the most from your marketing dollar; i.e. reducing your advertising waste, which is hard to track and expensive traditional advertising; and increasing product/service awareness and sales, the more customers who find your business, the more customers who buy ~ after all it is a numbers game.

Econsultancy published a study “Marketing Budgets 2013 Report” which looks into how companies are allocating their online and offline marketing budgets in 2013. More than 800 companies were surveyed between December 2012 and February 2013. Of the 800 companies surveyed, 71% of businesses plan to increase their digital marketing budgets by 28% on average.

What does this mean for you? Online marketing is an important marketing channel and will be growing in importance indefinitely. Interestingly, among the various online marketing opportunities, content marketing is the big winner. 70% of businesses surveyed are increasing their content marketing budgets, putting content marketing in the lead. Content marketing and SEO work hand-in-hand to earn you new customers.

Strategic SEO ensures your messages meet your prospective customer first, creating your chance to close the sale before the competitor. You can really maximize the results of your marketing budget and MROI with a well-planned SEO strategy combined with traditional advertising such as print, billboard, radio and TV.

In essence, it pays to start SEO right away, look at your advertising spending today and see if you can identify $1,000-$2,000 you can ‘re-allocate’ to SEO? For example, are you presently spending $5,000 per month on print advertising? A sound business strategy is to reduce the amount spent on print advertising by $1,000-$2,000 to put towards SEO.

The most cost-effective media to attract your customers is the Internet, and the results can be reliably tracked and analyzed for future marketing planning. Good SEO allows you to improve the over-all effectiveness of your marketing plan, SEO can be your ‘marketing mission control’ giving you the truest way to measure the effectiveness and return on investment of the money you spend on print, billboard, radio, and TV advertising.

SEO is a real monitor of how well your traditional advertising is performing. Make the key goal of your traditional advertising to direct customers to your website, to create excitement about a promotion or sale you are having, or to provide information on a service; measure the increase in website activity when your print/billboard/radio/TV ads run, and ‘know’ if it is effective or not, and ‘know’ whether to continue spending advertising money on it or not, or to spend more money on one advertising method over another less effective method.

Well-planned direct mail for example, can direct customers to your website, ensuring you an accurate trace of whether the direct mail piece (or other media) are being well-received. Was the direct mail effective? We can know it was read in the least if they visit the website, and we can measure the return on investment when it turns into a sale. Additionally, increasing the traffic to your website, provides the added technical benefit that your page rank and web page authority/credibility on Google and Bing search engines increase/remain.

The choice to apply SEO as your central marketing tool is to hone in on:

a marketing strategy which maximizes your MROI, reducing advertising expenses/waste while increasing incoming calls or qualified leads;
a strategy which coincides with traditional advertising methods to maximize brand awareness and return on traditional advertising spend;
a strategy which reduces not only wasted advertising money, but environmental waste as well (especially print advertising, direct mail, etc.);
a marketing tool which allows you to measure advertising spend performance and fine tune your business plan for the future;
a business model which increases your businesses over-all competitiveness.

To help you understand how your Internet Marketing or SEO strategy is performing in terms of its potential today and in terms of its position versus your competitors, please do not hesitate to contact me for a complimentary professional analysis.

Anthony Borges
SuperCool Solutions Co. Ltd.
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M.R.O.I. CHAMPS