You’ve probably heard it a thousand times: “SEO requires a commitment.”
It’s true.
But a lot of SEO clients interpret “commitment” as referring to the monthly budget. To be fair, a lot of SEO agencies encourage this type of thinking — especially ones that are more interested in cashing checks than helping clients cash in on better organic search visibility.
However, in SEO, commitment means more than just money — a lot more. Believe it or not, for most businesses, money is the easiest part of commitment to embrace. Other elements of commitment are far more challenging, but just as important if not more important to the ultimate success of an SEO campaign.
The Tough Love of SEO
What does commitment entail for an SEO campaign? Here are the things every company must do to achieve superior SEO performance:
- Let the agency drive the campaign. Companies hate giving up control of anything, but you hired an SEO agency because of its expertise, so don’t hamstring or undermine its ability by overruling its strategic and tactical decisions. This alone will improve the odds of a successful SEO campaign from 10 percent to 90 percent. Plus, if the campaign fails, you will be 100 percent sure about where to point the finger.
- Learn. Here is the flip side of the last point. We believe the best client is an educated client, and spend a lot of time writing articles like this one to further the educational process. Many companies want to hand off SEO to an agency entirely and have no involvement at all with strategy and tactics. Yet agencies need client input to create effective SEO content, select the right keywords and understand target audience preferences. Without client input, campaigns will be superficial and fail to resonate with a company’s customers and prospects. (Incidentally, there are a few companies out there that fail in both of these points: They refuse to learn the basics of SEO and insist on making all of the calls.)
- Wait to pass judgment. It is a rare company indeed that reflexively takes the long view and bites the bullet when enduring short-term shortfalls in progress. However, SEO is a long-term proposition, and it can take many months or even years to produce awesome results. Companies that succeed in SEO resist the mighty temptation to call it quits after a handful of so-so months. Not only do they bail on what could have been an outstanding campaign, they get stuck in a rut of swapping out agencies every three to nine months, wasting their own time and investment.
- Change legacy marketing. For many companies, the most horrifying word in the world is “change,” especially when it involves internal change. Fortunately or unfortunately, a great SEO campaign frequently requires changes to how a company thinks about, categorizes and describes its products and services. It may also require a different pitch to attract a new audience segment, a different way to position the brand, and a number of other fundamentally different marketing approaches. The good news is that changes like these, while driven by SEO, always make sense from a customer and lead generation perspective — if the changes didn’t help improve customer response, the SEO agency would never want to make them.
Are you interested in learning more about how a rock-solid SEO campaign can put more leads in your pipeline? Please contact us now. We are eager to learn more about your current situation and see if we can help.