Why You Need SEO For Long-Term Marketing Success

Successful content marketers are constantly looking for strategies to improve their marketing performance, everything from content strategy to writing, graphic design and social media marketing. While it’s great to get social shares and new leads from your content, if they don’t ultimately convert into actual sales and revenue for your company, your marketing ROI just won’t be good enough.

So what’s one strategy that will bring you the greatest possible return on your content marketing investment in the long term? According to this MarketingProfs article, the answer is SEO.

SEO Works Like Compound Interest

If you’ve ever taken a business course or talked to a financial investor, you may likely have learned about the principal of compound interest and how powerful it is. It’s one of the many reasons that explain the financial growth and success of some of today’s millionaires and billionaires.

How compound interest works is that, when earning a consistent interest rate, your principal – the amount of money you initially invest – will grow, and as your principal grows so will the interest you earn, and this ultimately creates a snowball effect producing greater returns on your investment.

The author of the MarketingProfs article Timothy Carter states that SEO works the same way, given the right strategy is implemented properly. For example, when you create a piece of content that adds value to your target audience and industry, and you have a good distribution strategy to get it in front of the right people, including high value prospects as well as influencers and popular sites for promotion and syndication, your content will earn hundreds (and even thousands) of reads, social shares, inbound links and quality leads that ultimately convert.

This piece of content will continue to earn new readers, links, visibility and sales for your company over time, and as you create more related content, you’ll see the same growth pattern. Carter argues that this is what differentiates SEO from traditional marketing and advertising tactics.

Take pay-per-click ads, for example, you spend a specific amount of money for a certain amount of clicks. If your return on every dollar you spend is two dollars, that rate will remain consistent over time. You may be able to increase it by making changes to your ad copy or adding a new channel for promotion, but ultimately you will hit a ceiling with your growth.

SEO, on the other hand, works like compounding interest and so your growth won’t hit a ceiling. While one could argue that other strategies like email marketing also share qualities similar to compounding interest, Carter claims that SEO has one mathematical reason that gives it a winning advantage over other strategies – its exponential growth in search ranking, readership, referral traffic and visibility.

4 Benefits Of SEO That Other Marketing Strategies Don’t Have

1. Search Ranking

Relevant, valuable content will continue to earn links over time, regardless of when it is published. This in turn improves the ranking of the individual webpage, moving it closer to the first page of search results. At the same time, any new content you subsequently create, which your audience finds relevant and valuable, will grow in a similar way. Together, all your content will help multiply growth in your brand’s total search rank.

2. Readership

Your readership will grow as you publish content more regularly and consistently and syndicate to popular, high traffic sites related to your industry. When you reach a level of popularity, you will start to see your readership grow exponentially simply as a result of your existing readership.

3. Referral Traffic

One of the many obvious benefits of creating relevant, valuable content is that it helps to reach, engage and ultimately convert your target audience. But another big benefit is that quality content helps you build inbound links.

The more inbound links you receive externally from authoritative websites in your space, the higher your content will rise in search results. And these external posts will continue to drive more referral traffic for you, even long past their publication. As you build more inbound links, your website will rank higher in search engines, driving more awareness, traffic and readership to your site.

4. Visibility

As you continue to build relationships with more publishers and influencers and grow your social media following, your overall visibility in your industry will grow. You’ll also want to regularly track and identify any gaps and opportunities for improvement for each point of visibility, to ensure continuous, sustainable growth in the future.

These are just four of the many benefits you’ll see with developing a well-rounded SEO strategy. When combined with an effective content marketing and social media marketing strategy, you’ll see a much higher ROI than any other marketing strategies in the long haul.

While you may not see a big change in your marketing performance overnight, if you build a solid SEO foundation early on and continuously measure and improve your strategy as you go, you will see exponential returns in your marketing efforts like how compound interest adds up.

What do you think? Has SEO delivered the kind of marketing ROI the MarketingProfs article said it would? What strategies have you found to be most effective in accomplishing your marketing goals and objectives? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please share in the comments section below!

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