Is SEO right for my company?
It comes up a lot that I get a call from a potential client who would like to “SEO” their website. This is great. They realize that good search rankings will build their site traffic, but that it takes effort. They are interested in finding out what is involved.
However, sometimes they don’t understand what the work of SEO entails. It’s not uncommon to think that SEO is as simple as hiring an SEO person who will sprinkle some keywords throughout the website and make everything good. But, in order to be truly effective, good SEO needs to be baked into almost every aspect of a long term site plan.
Here are four questions I ask when assessing if SEO is a good fit for your organization:
Does your marketing team understand that SEO is about topical authority? Topics are sometimes too broad for some clients. For instance, optimizing for “truck parts” would likely be too broad for a company like Weller Truck. Their most valuable audience is probably looking for something more specific. Topical optimization is normally better for mass market rather than very niche markets. Determining the right granularity of “topic” is critical.
Do you have the interest (and resources) to execute a long term (12 month) content strategy? This could/should include developing topically relevant content such as blog posts, expert reviews, industry perspective articles, announcements, press releases, product papers, technology white papers, how-to videos, etc. Organic optimization is all about accumulating authority over time. This requires a much more thorough plan than sprinkling some keywords around a website.
Do you have good website analytics in place? Reliable analytics are critical to see where you are at and what progress looks like.
Do you distribute content to social media and other industry websites? Sharing content and third-party links are still really important.
If you can answer YES to every question, then SEO is a great idea.
If you can answer YES to only some, then it’s possible that SEO might not be a good fit for you. This means you’ll need to dig a bit deeper to assess the opportunity and see whether it is worthwhile to put some of these pieces in place.
This simple assessment has proved to be very effective at figuring out exactly what clients are looking for, and helping them move forward with assessing and refining their SEO strategy.