7 signs that you’re overvaluing search engine optimization

7 signs that you’re overvaluing search engine optimization

   earch engine optimization (SEO) has become such a giant buzzword, that even my non-marketing friends and family members discuss it. It seems that every person I interview for one of our job openings is an “SEO expert.” And I now see Danny Seo all over TV.
Jokes aside, let’s take a look at some research …

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According to Jen Doyle’s research for the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, 29% of B2B marketers consider search engine optimization to be very effective — more than email marketing, content marketing, and most noticeably, paid search.
But could that be a problem? It is human nature to overemphasize something that we think works well. (The minute someone tells me I’m funny – watch out! I’ll come up with every joke I can think of, and they’ll just keep getting worse.) And also, if we overvalue our investment in any one tactic, of course it will be more effective than the ones we’ve shunned.
With so much focus on SEO from every marketing blog on the Google-powered Web, I thought it might be worth your while to question if you’re overvaluing SEO.
So put the Google Keyword Tool down for just a minute, and for a contrarian viewpoint, see if any of these seven reasons that you’re a little too obsessed with search engine optimization / SEO / organic search / natural search / search marketing resonate with you:

1. You focus on SEO, not reader value
Blogs have a lot going for them:

• They’re “inbound marketing,” a way to pull customers in with no media spend.
• They’re a way to show that real people (not just stock photo people) work at your company, and after all, people buy from people.
• They help with your site’s SEO (partly because you’re constantly adding new content, partly because that new content can contain lots keywords, and partly because you’re giving reasons for others to link to your site).
• And to remix the old billboard advertising self-promo — Does anyone read blogs? Well, you’re reading this now, aren’t you?

But if you focus on just one minor benefit of blogs above — the keywords — I would argue that you’re shooting yourself in the foot. We’ve all seen the obvious keyword-stuffed blog post. Ask yourself this:

• Did that blog post make you want to engage in business with the person (assuming it was a person and not a robot) who wrote it?
• Did that blog post make you want to link to it? (So how much is it really helping with SEO to begin with?)
• Heck, was the thing even readable?

It doesn’t hurt to follow some key SEO best practices with your blog, just remember, there is more to a blog post than a list of target keywords.

2. Even worse, you overlook conversion
The point of landing pages, even ones that are focused on gaining organic traffic, is to convince the visitor to take an action — perhaps buy a product or fill out a lead generation form.
If you’re so scared of conducting some landing page optimization with A/B split testing to help improve that conversion rate because you’re worried any changes you make will hurt your search ranking, you may be overvaluing SEO.
After all, if you get a lot of organic traffic but do a poor job of converting it, that top rank isn’t going to do your business a whole lot of good.

3. You think SEO is the only way to get a relevant audience from search marketing
The reason search marketing is so powerful is that it gives marketers an unprecedented ability to tap into customer’s motivations at the time they are most motivated.
As the president of the first ad agency I worked at used to say, “The reason they have to run a refrigerator ad on Page 3 of the newspaper every day is because one day your refrigerator is going to break and they don’t know what day that will be. But they do know that, while you’ll ignore that ad every other day, the one day your refrigerator breaks, they’ll get you.”
With search marketing, I’ll just type in “refrigerator repair” when my fridge breaks, followed three frustrating days later by “refrigerator reviews.”
But, the reason Google is valued at $210 billion is because not all of that traffic can be scooped up with organic search results.
In fact, according to recent research from Google entitled, “Impact Of Ranking Of Organic Search Results On The Incrementality Of Search Ads,” by David X. Chan, Deepak Kumar, Sheng Ma and Jim Koehler, “On average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental” (the emphasis is mine).
So even if you’ve captured the Boardwalk of search marketing, the prime real estate in Google’s little game of Monopoly, that #1 organic ranking, you can still gain additional clicks from a paid search ad (obvious conflict of interest alert: this study is, after all, from the people trying to sell you paid search ads).