SEO versus Digital Marketing

There are a lot of SEO “gurus” out there at the moment that are going to be really upset by this post, but truth be told, SEO specialists who do nothing more than SEO are a dime a dozen.

Companies demanding more from SEO

Companies have moved on from the generic offerings of traditional SEO consultants. In the days gone by, companies were solely concerned by having their companies ranking “number 1” in Google for their primary search phrases. Now I’m not for a second suggesting that this is not longer important; on the contrary, I am suggesting that this is the first step to a far longer journey than that.

Companies are now interested in not only getting lots of visitors to their site, but more importantly, they are interested in getting lots of the right kinds of visitors to their site. Visitors who are not only going to just visit their site and then leave after a short while; they are looking for conversions!

Conversions are visitors who fill in forms and send through enquiries or actually become customers in the case of an e-commerse site.

This is where traditional SEO consultants seem to fall over. Whether they are using traditional SEO techniques to achieve organic rankings or are employing PPC marketing initiatives, they seem to stop at getting visitors to the website and then forget that this is not actually achieving any real business objectives for their clients.

What comes after visitors reach the site?

After a visitor reaches the site is where the real difference comes in and where a number of factors work out what that visitor will do next.

SEO Consultants have got it right that the page on which a visitor lands is critically important; as the visitor needs to land on a page that is highly relevant to the search query that they typed in.

Where a digital marketer or organisation takes the next step is they then analyse data for each specific landing page (such as bounce rate, time on page, etc) and ensure that the page is perfectly optimised to make sure that the visitor takes the correct action on the page, be it filling in a form, making a purchase etc.

What Does this mean?

When choosing your Digital Marketing partner, it very often does make a lot of financial sense to choose a freelance consultant or SEO “guru”  who specialises in just SEO (either organic or AdWords); but if need your website to become a self sustaining business  tool that doesn’t just have a lot of traffic, but a lot of conversions as well, then I would strongly suggest that you ensure that whomever you choose is well versed in Website Optimisation techniques.