There's no requirement to "do" SEO
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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See the case study at the end of this update.
During my consulting career, I have been fortunate to meet with and learn from many respected business leaders in the tech industry. It never ceases to surprise me how quickly marketing leaders will spend millions of dollars on search engine advertising (Google ads and others) while only investing in SEO as an afterthought.
This dichotomy can even be more jarring when I learn of the massive delta between the budgets and returns from these channels. I have seen companies that spend tens of millions of dollars annually on paid marketing only to achieve a breakeven return. At the same time, their SEO investment is less than half a million dollars per year, and it returns 3x what their paid marketing returns in gross revenue.
It’s not that these leaders ignore SEO; they do it to check the box without investing in the necessary resources.
The flip side of underinvesting is overinvesting in SEO efforts when there’s no justifiable reason for it. This begs a question that must be answered.
Should you invest in SEO?
I think both underinvesting and overinvesting approaches come from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to invest in a profitable search initiative and instead rely on a faulty assumption of what SEO is.
Many leaders believe that an SEO investment means only updating a website to be on par with the best practices from search engines. Additionally, they assume that SEO means churning out content that will show up in search engines. This misconception is even more dangerous with generative AI because the budget does not cap how much content is created.
When allocating resources towards projects, they don’t think of these particular efforts as revenue-driving initiatives, so they don’t direct significant budgets for SEO.
They are correct that, in many cases, minor website updates and content will not be highly profitable, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an SEO investment to be made.
To decide whether they (or really you) should be investing in SEO, it’s worth determining first if you have an audience that will be discovering your website on search engines.
If you get one thing from this newsletter, this should be it:
SEO is a demand capture channel, not a demand creation channel.
SEO demand is not always a given as many genres will not be discovered via search, but if yours is not one of those, you would be foolish not to invest in search.
(An example might be a lifestyle innovation that will be highly impactful for the adherents to this lifestyle, but no one knows to look for it as a solution to problems they can’t identify.
The 7-hour workweek might be significantly more productive than the 4-hour one, but no one knows how to look for it. )
Once you have identified that your site is a great candidate for an SEO investment, only then can you decide how to deploy that investment. Armed with the knowledge that users are likely looking for your product and service on search engines and not finding you, you can then brainstorm ideas on how to be visible to those users.
In my book, Product-Led SEO, I delve into ideas and suggestions for how to build an entire product offering around these users, but this approach isn’t a fit for everyone and could be cost-prohibitive.
The right approach will be contingent on the business category, user persona, and, most importantly, what the users might seek on a search engine.
User needs could be addressed with a handful of blog posts, a photo library, and a video series - when it comes to users, there will never be a one-size-fits-all all. All users and all businesses are different. Even if an approach works for a competitor, there is no guarantee it will work for you, too.
The right solution for each business needs to be developed in a much deeper process than any newsletter can do, but here are some starter thoughts.
Steps to determine if you should invest in SEO
Questions you should ask yourself when you develop your strategy are:
• Is there something about your site or business that makes you uniquely able to build this offering for SEO? You are likely already using your unique proposition in other areas of marketing - bring this into your SEO. It’s always astonishing to me how often the key value proposition that is the driver behind all other marketing campaigns is neglected in SEO messaging in favor of keywords suggested by an SEO tool.
• Will it be difficult to copy you because you did more than use keyword research to create content? Are you just copying someone else? Again, a business has a reason it exists or hopes to exist. If it’s just a copy, it can only last until someone copies it better.
• Are you targeting search queries that real humans would write? Keep the focus on the real human buyer as you develop your content. I love developing SEO content by talking to real users, but there are shortcuts I will share in a future update that you can use if real users are unavailable.
• Do you believe you can justify the investment in SEO based on downstream revenue? If you can’t justify your SEO investment, return to the drawing board, or don’t do SEO. Especially in resource-constrained startups and scale-ups, budgets should be allocated towards initiatives that will have the best fast return and not those that seem good or will hopefully work out.
The answers to these questions should define your SEO strategy. This means that the underpinning of your SEO strategy is focused on addressing user needs over search engine requirements.
If the answer to these questions is that there is no unique reason or even any reason at all that a user would use a search engine to find you, you might be better off reconsidering any investment in this channel at all, for now.
SEO can wait
Whatever you discover, make no mistake: this is an investment in time, resources, and budget. You will be building something or at least writing content for human users, and a half-baked approach will not achieve your revenue objectives.
The impact on the business should prioritize all decisions, and depending on where the business stands, it may be unwise to prioritize SEO.
SEO is a part of your business; all of your SEO investment should contribute to the growth of the business and be measured by the same metrics as the rest of your business.
[Sponsored by Search Intelligence]
We created a playlist on Spotify and earned a tsunami of links for our fitness client. This is how we’ve done it:
▪ On behalf of our client, we produced a 1-hour playlist best suited for a cardio workout.
▪ We evaluated the audio features of all the songs on the Spotify global charts over the past summer in terms of their:
↳ Danceability
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Awesome post, Eli! Thanks for sharing!