By Pete Winter

The Most Effective Search Engine Marketing Strategy

SEO: What’s so surprising about SEO?

The popularity of SEO as a business marketing activity is no surprise. Recent research has shown that nearly 60% of purchases made in a surveyed group started with a search, rather than with company websites or social media (Source: GroupM and comScore).

With the number of internet users in the UK predicted to grow to an estimated 43.7 million by 2012 (Source: eMarketer), the popularity of search marketing is set to continue. No surprises there. But what is surprising is just how many companies overlook ways to get SEO working more effectively. These include:

Keeping it strategic: Website SEO is one of those activities that is frequently undertaken reactively. Yet undertaking it in conjunction with inbound marketing resources makes it much more lucrative.

Keeping it focused on sales: SEO marketing on its own is just one aspect of the online sales funnel. By building it into an overall inbound marketing approach you can attract web traffic, engage web visitors and convert them into customers, as part of an ongoing sales cycle.

Don’t do SEO without thinking of your sales funnel

Thinking of SEO in isolation from the rest of your marketing strategy is very likely to deliver poor results. Great if you’ve got your SEO right and it’s driving your website up the search engine rankings and drawing people to your website – the top of your sales funnel. Not so great if your visitors get to your site but leave because there is no landing page or content specially created to nurture them. That’s your online sales pipeline broken in the middle of the funnel. Even worse, this could actually have a detrimental effect on your SEO because the search engines will see these visitors bouncing away from your website and may penalise you, pushing you lower down the rankings.