Investing in content and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will help your business succeed over the long term. While implementing an approach that gives instant results is necessary for a successful business, it’s wise not to overlook marketing strategies that deliver consistent and sustainable results over time.

What is a long-term marketing strategy?

A long-term marketing strategy is a plan that implements both SEO and content marketing in order to drive visibility and increase clicks. You’ll often find that many services offer content as part of SEO, and vice versa. This is because they both complement each other. To put it another way, in order to see results over the long term it’s wise to invest in both simultaneously.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is basically the process of making your website visible. It helps you to be seen by customers searching for the product or service you provide. Without SEO, no matter how good your website is, or how informative and compelling your content is, people simply won’t see it. Your website will drown in the proverbial sea of competitors, sinking rapidly into the dingy depths of Google page 2 and beyond (nobody surfs there).

Content

Content serves as a means to inform, educate, and ultimately compel your readers to convert. It works in tandem with SEO on two fronts. 

Without SEO, no one is going to see your content. Without visibility of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs), how can you expect people to see the enriching content you have written? 

Secondly, content helps search engines like Google understand your website better. By implementing relevant keywords throughout your content, search engines can accurately determine the essence of your website and then give it a ranking. The more accurate your keyword targeting is, the higher up the rankings you will appear. 

However, there is a caveat. Unfortunately, you can’t just create some “content” that is simply a list of keywords in the hopes that it will suffice in improving your rankings – once-up-a-time that did actually work. 

Content creators could simply add a list of relevant keywords to their website pages, and search engines would crawl through their website, pick up the keywords, and give it a respectable ranking. Search engines of the past, like GoobledyGoogle (yes, that was a real search engine), may have been easily fooled by this, but the big boys of today are a lot more savvy than that. 

In other words, for search engines to crawl your website effectively and give you a good ranking, you will have to write quality content that is peppered with the appropriate keywords, which have been researched by a first-class SEO team. 

How can SEO and content help my business?

1. Accumulation of leads

Investing in a content strategy will add lasting value to your website by accumulating leads over time. Like any good investment, the more content you add and the longer it exists, the more returns your website will experience. Therefore, it’s crucial to implement a content strategy early on. Once implemented, you should consistently produce new and quality content to see results over the long term.

2. A continuous flow of increased traffic

One of the biggest reasons to invest in SEO is the steady flow of traffic your website sees once the ball is rolling. By implementing an SEO strategy, your website will see a sustained and consistent stream of traffic as your website visibility improves. 

3. Brand awareness

Investing in SEO leads to higher search engine rankings. A benefit of this is not only higher conversions but increased brand awareness too. 

Your website can rank through association, not just specifics. By implementing a strategy that allows your business to rank for more general terms, you’ll have eyes on your brand when people aren’t necessarily looking for it. 

Now, appearing in front of users, they either convert or they don’t. Not converting may sound like a disadvantage, but there is a silver lining. 

The silver lining is that users, despite nothing else, gain an increased awareness of your brand. Now, your visitors are more likely to return and refer others to your brand too. There are other benefits of brand awareness:

• A boost in lead generation
• Encouragement of customer loyalty
• Increased sales
• Improved public perception of your brand
• Helping your brand stand out from your competitors

4. Cost-effective means

Whilst SEO is paid for in terms of management fees and also content writers (unless you decide to do it yourself), there are no additional cost-per-click fees on top – the traffic gained through SEO is free. 

Considerations before investing

Whilst the traffic itself saves you a cost, this doesn’t mean that you should invest in SEO straight away. You’ll first have to evaluate the industry you are competing in. Once you know this, you can determine the budget for your investment in SEO.

A good rule of thumb is that the more competitive the industry, the more you’ll have to invest to get your website to the top of SERPs. Ultimately, this determines the cost-effectiveness and size of your return on investment (ROI). 

That said, there is a drawback to this strategy, and that is time. To start to see your organic ads rank on page one, there is usually a delay period of 3-6 months (however, with a good SEO team and strategy, you could see results within a few months). 

It’s during this period that it’s optimal to use strategies that give instant results while you wait for your long-term plan to take effect. 

The optimal solution is to invest in both

The message then, is not to negate one strategy in favour of the other. In truth, both short-term and long-term strategies have their uses and each should be invested in when looking at your marketing strategy. 

Where short-term strategies like PPC lack the means to give you sustained results over time, a long-term approach like SEO and content can pick up the slack here – and vice versa.  

If you’re interested in learning more about how different marketing strategies can help your business, why not contact us? We’re happy to help and walk you through how our services can benefit your website and grow your business. 

Want to chat in person? Come along to our next event, we run regular interactive marketing workshops in Manchester and Lancashire.

Author: Isaac Backhouse, Copywriter, Door4