How did we get here?
The imbalance between short and long-term thinking makes sense on a few levels:
We are living through tricky macro-economic times. While not all budgets are being tightened, all without fail are being scrutinised closely. Committing to short-term tactical projects as opposed to longer-term strategic engagements feels easier and less risky. As a specialist agency, we are seeing that happen increasingly often.
Digital continues to accelerate at a dizzying pace. Simply keeping up with change is difficult enough, never mind getting ahead of the game. If you’re constantly shooting at a moving target, how do you commit to growth or pin success on something tangible?
CMOs are in post for an average of 39 months before moving on. Where’s the incentive to think strategically beyond that time, if you’re not expecting to be get credit for the results?
Beyond these reasons, the imbalance begins to make less sense, especially from our standpoint as organic marketers.
SEO is the key to balancing brand and performance marketing
Quick caveat here – I know SEO is constantly dying or being redefined in some way, but when we talk about SEO at Builtvisible, we essentially mean search-based customer journeys. That is to say, if we know/believe there is/will be demand for something, we can optimise for discovery of that thing. Google historically has been where consumers live, but that’s diversifying all the time.
Note, you can read more about alternative search journeys in our latest whitepaper.Whichever way you look at it, CPAs are on the rise across the digital mix. Brands are paying more and more to get pushed in front of customers online, and the need to reduce CPA is probably the most cited challenge I hear from CMOs.
Within our world of search, the nearest opportunity for tackling CPA is obviously getting the right balance between SEO and paid search.
I often refer to PPC as the crack cocaine of digital marketing. The initial rewards are exciting, but the long term consequences are that potency wains, costs to acquire continue to rise and the loyal, brand-advocate customer base you are trying to entice becomes more and more transactional in nature.
See the problem? Leadership wants to see quick results with lower CPAs and CMOs don’t stay in post for enough time to incentivise long-term plays, and yet the solution to reducing CPAs lies in deeply committing to a strategy for the mid to long-term.
The power of SEO: building trust and reducing CPA
At its core, SEO is about meeting customers where they are, on their terms. Unlike transactional paid ads, organic search empowers customers to discover brands naturally, creating a foundation of trust – a holy grail in all forms of marketing.
Customers who find you organically are more likely to trust you and engage with your content, more likely to convert through your content, and more likely to become loyal advocates over the long-term thus increasing LTV.
Furthermore, organic is a proven method for reducing CPAs. Performance marketing’s costs continue to rise, but SEO offers a cost-efficient alternative by generating sustained traffic over time. For sectors grappling with high CPAs, such as financial services, this approach is game-changing.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a closer look at a recent example with one of our wonderful insurance provider clients:.
TLDR:
Tactical Digital PR activity on pages that generate high value customers long term (pensions) resulted in a 174% increase in clicks within 8 months – without the need for a large-scale PR campaign. By folding revenue figures into the activity, comparative ROIs versus the expected PPC costs come out as follows: PPC – high range bid: -19% ROI, PPC – low range bid: 276% ROI, SEO approach: 467% ROI.
- Our proprietary strategy product Opportunity Sizing told us significant gains were available within a short timeframe if we could build a certain quality of links at a certain rate.
- The page in question relates to pensions meaning conversions in this area have a high lifetime value.
- High value typically means more competition and looking at paid search data this was definitely the case. The top end of many CPCs extended into double figures (£s) in this instance.
- With that in mind we began a stream of contentless “tactical” link building. For us that means building highly relevant links to deep commercial pages, using competitor data and entrepreneurial techniques without having to create large “Digital PR” campaigns that are better placed when working on brand building / domain strengthening.
- We know this type of link building is highly effective and typically has clear commercial impacts, while it’s concurrently often far less of an investment in terms of time, effort and money.
- No other activity was run on this page during this period, and the initiative resulted in a 174% increase in clicks within 8 months.
- Clicks is one thing, but revenue is another. By folding revenue figures into the activity, comparative ROIs come out as follows:
- PPC – high range bid: -19% ROI
- PPC – low range bid: 276% ROI
- SEO approach: 467% ROI
And that’s ignoring the fact that SEO keeps working for you after the work is done. There’ll be some decay if you do absolutely nothing else from that point onwards, of course, but the point still stands and is a powerful one.
Now imagine scaling that concept up across an entire product or service portfolio. All of a sudden, SEO is making a meaningful contribution to your bottom line, as well as the top.
Why isn’t everyone thinking like this?
It all sounds simple, but so many brands are struggling to adopt the thinking and processes that maximise the effectiveness of SEO. Broadly, I see this struggle boiling down to two things, within the context of the short-termism I outlined at the beginning.
Education
The reality is, very few CMOs come from a specialist SEO background. Broadly most CMOs self-identify as having one of two core “specialisms” – brand or performance, or they tend to mark themselves down as generalists.
Good SEO (or “organic” more widely) sits at the intersection of brand and performance and ties both together, so why would there ever be an expectation of deep domain expertise in this area if few people calling the shots have hands-on experience of the channel?
Equally, SEO has a tendency to operate in the incrementality, fine margins and detail of digital. All things senior marketers are typically trying to get away from to ensure they can focus on the big picture.
As a result, CMOs and specialists need to make sure they are finding common ground to unpick the often abstract world of SEO.
At its heart, the three core components of SEO (technical, on-site and off-site) are reasonably straightforward to comprehend but how they all play together is where the magic happens. Spending time dissecting all three of these and laddering them up to the bigger picture is a really good use of time and something we spend a lot of time doing as a specialist agency with senior client-side stakeholders.
Find out how our data team forecast, optimise and test to ensure our work drives revenue.
Getting to the crux of this makes my second “So what” a whole lot easier:
Commercial measurement of value
The SEO industry is obsessed with proxy KPIs (a perfect manifestation of being in the detail) which is doing the channel no favours when it comes to being understood or taken seriously.
I very much see SEO as competing with paid channels when it comes to proving value. For channels like paid search you have clear “money-in, money-out” measures which are very easy to understand.
“How many links have we built?” or “Are we P1 for [keyword]” are not the type of questions being asked by paid marketing teams, whereas “how much revenue have we driven?” or “how has this channel improved our bottom line?” very much are. You could also argue the former are very short-term in nature and the latter much more forward-facing.
Even within brand marketing where some (including me) might argue the metrics are a bit more woolly, one can accept there is an broadly agreed methodology and benchmark/measure accordingly.
So, we need SEO to get to a “money-in, money-out” model where possible. In my experience the biggest blocker to getting this is a brand’s own data, but the second biggest is the lack of desire to build such a thing.
Even if said model is imperfect on day one, you are working with something that once agreed, can be measured, optimised and crucially, iterated upon. If everyone involved is aligned as to how we got here, we’re in a good place.
We don’t have to get it perfect day one, but we can start having better conversations.
Conclusion
OK hopefully you can see that I’m not advocating for you to switch off your paid ads, but you should definitely use the idea as a jumping off point to explore what proper SEO/organic digital marketing could do for your brand.
Working in the extremes forces us to challenge our thinking because it typically creates unrealistic or unlikely scenarios. We’ve found ourselves doing it more and more with our clients to try and break down barriers to the often enormous, unrealised potential of SEO. So hopefully (click-bait aside), this has at least sparked something.
Not sure where to begin? If you’d like to speak to us about organic strategy, campaigns or consultancy, get in touch.
