In this great whiteboard friday from way back in 2014, Rand Fishkin talks about the “SEO Slog” and why it’s important to manage your work as well as your client expectations in order to secure positive outcomes.
We wanted to take the opportunity to talk about how this issue of the SEO slog illustrates the need for, and the value of, using an integrated digital strategy over a piecemeal marketing approach.
Initial Onsite Work
As mentioned by Fishkin, initially setting up an SEO campaign often brings fast, excellent results. This is because we go in and do basic things that pack a big punch, like ensuring that pages are crawlable, fixing headers and meta tags, optimizing URLs, and rewriting site content to be keyword friendly.
This initial work has to be done before it can make sense to start other digital marketing work like PPC, link building, or serious content marketing since a site that looks bad won’t convert, and it won’t do much good to link to a page whose URL is going to be changed a week later.
Digital Marketing Diversification
When initial onsite optimization is done, boosting rankings gets a lot more difficult, and progress slows considerably. Now we have to start building links, guest posting, and driving traffic. Getting a page to rank well can take many months, and it’s understandable that a client on a limited budget will be skeptical of an SEO company’s assurances if they didn’t expect the slowdown after the initial boost. Furthermore, they might just not be able to afford to continue a campaign that isn't driving as much growth as they expected.
Ensuring that our clients can continue their SEO campaigns means we have to find other ways to bring traffic and sales to our customers while we work on making their SEO investment pay off.
This often means starting PPC, social, content marketing, and other types of digital marketing efforts that operate side by side with our long-term SEO campaigns. These work to provide a faster return on investment to help clients maintain some growth while we continue to push on important keyword rankings.
Integrating Long Term Efforts
As key landing pages begin to rank for relevant keywords over time, they’ll start driving more organic traffic and paying off for clients. This, in turn, will help to establish the client’s business as an authority in their industry and make it easier to build social followings, to build a regular consumer and amplifier base for your content, and to solicit guest posting opportunities.
Integrating all of these campaigns into a single strategy is ultimately the way to achieve well-rounded success in a digital marketing campaign. Every action in your digital strategy is designed to facilitate the success of the next action.
Are you looking to start a digital marketing campaign for your business? Our miami web design company offers full service digital marketing. Check it out today!