It’s true that the main focus of search engine optimisation is and should be the search engines. Every SEO campaign should have high rankings as its main aim. There are undoubted side benefits, however, that are truly worth pursuing. One of these is in using the information gathered during SEO research to improve your business’ marketing plan.

SEO and marketing really go hand in hand. Search engine optimisation is really a complicated way of improving interactions with a business’ target groups. The search engines spend their time investigating what best pleases searchers. In optimising for the search engines, a site is really optimising for users. This aims for the usual outcomes a business expects from marketing efforts, with a higher flow of traffic through the business, higher conversion rates once users are on the site, and ultimately a higher turnover.

Despite the inseparable relationship between SEO and marketing, not many businesses look very deeply into the marketing ramifications of SEO. This is a waste. Marketing is of undoubted importance to a business, but traditional thinking sets separate budgets and schedules for ‘website maintenance’ and ‘advertising.’ The result is that marketing campaigns and SEO campaigns are usually conducted separately. A smart business knows how to combine the two, using both more efficiently.

Take, for example, the language needed in good SEO content. A lot of the time, SEO professionals have to optimise web copy that is already on a site. The results are then posted, the ranking of the site alters, and after a while competitors catch up. New marketing copy is commissioned, but then the SEO firm has to be called in again to optimise the copy and the whole cycle repeats.

Many companies with a little more experience in SEO cut out the middle section of the cycle and approach their SEO company for marketing copy. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about this kind of service. The result is professionally written marketing copy that has SEO tactics threaded into its foundations. This saves a lot of time.

SEO can be used to help your marketing in much bigger ways as well. Take, for example, the analysis you should regularly perform on your SEO results. This will reveal which pages are being clicked into the most, which pages bounce users back to the linking site and which pages are being used as exits from the site. These patterns of user behaviour will inform you which of your SEO tactics is effective, and which need to change.

The results also inform you about the efficacy of your marketing tactics. If a page seems to be driving users away, you change it. If, however, the page features a particular marketing tactic, such as a hard sell, you should change this, too. If the hard sell is failing all over your site, this should inform your off-page marketing, as it is an indication of what your users won’t react to.

SEO can and should be used to inform your site’s marketing principles. Make your SEO campaign work extra hard by incorporating its results into your marketing.

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