I’ve worked with 532 agencies (estimate) that run paid ads for their clients. When I suggest they optimize organic traffic, they shrug. Color me confused.
The fastest route from point A (“I want more business”) to point B (“I want to increase the number of site visitors in the hopes of converting them into paying customers”) is to run paid ads. The slower, much more cost efficient, and much more strategic route long term is to identify keyphrases that matter to your target audience and then build timely, relevant content around those keyphrases.
Many marketing agencies (though certainly not all) go the quick, dirty, and costly route and run ads right out of the gate. More problematic still, they often don’t build on-page SEO. They’re so focused on the here and now that they don’t implement a strategic, longer term play.
As a result, those ads have to do lots of heavy lifting, all the more so since there’s no organic SEO engine humming along to help. Agency clients pay a hefty price for these ads, which will have to run until the end of time since there’s no plan to put in that engine.
Optimize Organic Traffic Before Running Paid Ads
When I see agencies running costly ad campaigns for their clients without building any on-page SEO content, I ask them what gives. Some agency owners shrug and say paid ads are their standard agency solution. Some say it’s too hard to get client buy-in for a solution that may not show results for months. Others school me, taking the opportunity to tell me that I really don’t understand very much about SEO.
Expensive ads? Thumbs up, many agency teams like to say. WordPress site? Wix or Squarespace or really anything will suffice. Yoast SEO? Meh – who needs it.
It’s true that one of doesn’t understand very much about SEO …
What a Completely Fair Advantage Looks Like
To enable your people to find you through searches and to capture consistent traffic from those people, optimize your website for Google and your Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube pages for the terms that matter most to your business.
Run paid ads. Run them all day long. But don’t overlook the benefits of building an on-page SEO engine, and don’t let your agency talk you out of implementing a smart SEO strategy.
Traffic and visits that you don’t have to pay for are your completely fair advantage.
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