According to allbusiness.com, marketing channels are defined as “avenues used by marketers to make products available to consumers. Wholesalers, distributors, sales agents, retailers, and all other sources used in getting the product to consumers are included in the category of marketing channels.”
Solid white hat SEO practices can improve the search engine placement of your website, but the marketing messages come from your website, social media accounts, blog posts and online ads. SEO can increase website traffic and awareness of your products and services, but cannot directly sell your products. Therefore, SEO is a traffic generation tool, and not a marketing channel.As a traffic generation tool, SEO is powerful, but to be successful, you need to integrate the traffic into the marketing channels that already exist for your firm. If every SEO client embraced this approach, they would increase the return on investment received from their SEO efforts. The following are some tips on how to accomplish this within your firm:
Get Input from Different Departments
The CEO of each firm needs to make company-wide input into the SEO process mandatory. Sales will know which products bring customers to the firm, Accounting will know which products or services are the most profitable, production or manufacturing will know which products lend themselves to increased production. Every department should have a say in the SEO strategy and keyword choices to ensure that the right customers are being reached to consider the correct products that will maximize profitability. Don’t be afraid to include input to SEO strategy into job descriptions.
Do the Small Stuff
Social Media has become so important as a tool to share valuable information, and social signals have become a significant factor in SEO. Do your signs and business cards carry the company website address or Twitter address? Do your sales presentations or brochures include website info, Facebook Fan Page, and the Twitter address and invite potential customers to follow? Find ways for your team to contribute to SEO and online marketing.
Motivate and Educate Your Team
Establish online goals and share the tracking of these goals with your team. Train those working closest with SEO in basic Local SEO Services, and include them in planning and discussions.
Putting education first creates ownership of the success of your SEO efforts and willn make conversations about SEO strategy more participatory and productive.
Let Your SEO Team in on “The Plan”
Your sales team knows what new product offerings are coming for weeks or months in advance. It takes time to plan, create marketing materials, and coordinate production schedules. The SEO Team should be planning SEO strategies, helping to create relevant content and implementing strategy during this time. Solid SEO decision making requires time to plan.
Bottom Line: Integrating your SEO team, whether internal or external, into your business planning is a solid business practice. Ensuring that your SEO team accepts input into planning from all departments of your company is a necessity. Organic SEO does not change and work as quickly as PPC and other methods of attracting online traffic. Organic SEO does, in the eyes of most web marketers, provide the best quality website traffic, so the planning and hard work necessary to improve Search Engine Positioning are worth the effort.
Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California based SEO, Online Marketing, and Website Development Firm.