When you search online, how often would you go past a search engine’s first page? For most people, not too often is the answer and as the saying unceremoniously goes: “The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google” because nobody will look there!
The very reason behind this is not a complex one. In today’s society and the ever-shrinking attention span we’ve been burdened with, who has time to go to the next page, when you can rephrase your question and get a better, more relevant answer instead?
When it comes to Organic CTR (Click Through Rate), the drop-off from each descending position can be quite shocking. Looking at the technology and computing industry, for example, the drop in CTR is severed from positions 1-10:
https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/
So as we’ve established, if you’re not on the first page then your traffic share is going to be minimal at best and non-existent at worst, and if there’s one thing that most companies on page 1 have in common, it’s that they have invested in their SEO strategy.
It is clear that for most established brands Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should be at the forefront of your customer acquisition strategy. If you improve the organic visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing, your potential customers can find you much easier. However, it is important to know that this is not the only benefit of SEO.
There is more power in SEO that goes well beyond traffic generation. Quality SEO helps match your products and services to the users by providing a better overall website experience and intuitive site functionality.
It is estimated that Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second. This is around 3.5 billion searches per day. Therefore, there is a huge amount of traffic available on a day-by-day basis.
Remember though, any websites beyond page one of Google get very minimal traffic. In fact, position 1 on Google gets 21% of the traffic, meaning that you need to be in pole position if you want to get the best result. However, being visible is not the only reason to invest in SEO as it is also important to establish your brands Expertise Authority and Trust (EAT)
SEO is the foundation of a holistic marketing ecosystem. When you understand what your website users want, you can implement that knowledge across your campaigns (paid and organic), your website, social media properties, and more.
A holistic SEO approach will capture organic traffic from all queries including brand and generic and mid and long-tail search terms. This can engage visitors at all levels of the user search journey. The best way to envision SEO in your marketing strategy is by applying it to your marketing funnel.
At the top of the marketing funnel, SEO can help drive awareness through the utilisation of a creative story-telling digital PR campaign.
Further down, Interest and Decision can be influenced through the creation of landing pages to drive product-level intent search traffic and informative content is good for search crawlers as well as users.
Utilising SEO at the bottom of the funnel allows you to optimise for highly specific and longtail keywords. Although these may have lower search volume, the search intent behind them is highly specific and closer for a user to take action.
Therefore, it is important to understand the role that both technical and content SEO plays in your marketing strategy. If you’re looking to improve your current strategy and keep up to date with the latest changes and trends, you can explore this further in our previous post about SEO trends for 2022.
Following the acquisition of Digital Agency Red Hot Penny, we are now able to offer SEO services alongside PR and Social. As an agency, we think audience first. Our data and insights are backed up by technical excellence to create successful strategies. Our technical and creative teams work closely together to ensure cohesive content production, targeted outreach, link acquisition and authority-building techniques, that will show your users the value you can provide across all your services.
So there you have it. The true power of SEO in one easy to read blog. If you would like to discuss your current SEO strategy, please email roscoe@thephagroup.com.