Don’t Focus Online Marketing Completely On SEO

Published on Tuesday, 19 March 2013 07:15

Darin McGilvra

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become such a big part of online marketing, but focusing your marketing effort completely on raising your ranking on search engines can be dangerous.

Good business practices dictate that any business should not be too dependent on one factor for success, especially one the business has little control over. This would be, as the old saying goes, putting all your eggs in one basket.

This includes marketing through search engines. While this is a powerful tool and can bring in a lot of traffic to your website when done properly, it doesn’t take much for things to change and that steady stream of traffic you’ve been counting on to quickly dry up.

A good example of this was Demand Media Studios. This company produced articles for numerous websites that were designed to rank high in search engines. It went public in January 2011, but just over a month later, a major change in Google’s algorithm caused Demand Media’s rankings to plummet and the traffic to the articles produced by the company dropped by close to 40 percent overnight.

The company was forced to make major changes. The vast majority of its writing and copy editing of articles are done by freelancers, so the company was able to survive by drastically cutting back on the number of articles it made available to writers. This meant that writers and copy editors went quickly from having thousands of articles to choose from to work on to fighting over a handful.

This should serve as a warning that counting on maintaining your ranking on search engines can be dangerous. You need to have other ways to drive traffic to your website, or even better is to keep the customers you already have.

Customer retention more important than SEO and online marketing

It is always easier to keep customers than it is to bring in new ones. This has been true since the beginning of commerce, when advertising amounted to calling out to shoppers walking by in the marketplace. Making sure that customers that buy from you today will return to buy from you tomorrow or next week was the only way to be consistently profitable.

Nowadays, customer retention is much simpler and generally more affordable than advertising for new customers. It is so easy to have current customers supply you their email and then send them newsletters, special offers, or even announcements of new products or services being made available.

The most effective advertising comes from your customers. Getting your customers to tell their friends and family members about your business can be done through providing the best customer service possible. Your customers need to feel that they are getting a good deal for the price they are paying. Then, they will be happy to share with their friends and family how they can get a great deal for themselves at your business through word of mouth or the online version of word of mouth: social media.

Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, should always be a major focus of your marketing efforts. They are free to start using, and they make it easy for your customers to share what you offer with their friends and family.

SEO is an important part of online marketing, but you can survive any drops in traffic to your website by having a well-rounded approach to your marketing efforts.

Darin McGilvra

Darin McGilvra has been a professional writer since 1997. He currently writes about personal finances, information technology and sports for numerous websites, including mycashtime.com, mchelper.com, and Yahoo! Sports.

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