We all know that search engine optimisation, also called SEO for short, is a huge buzz word at the moment. Everybody is talking about it from the cab driver to the CEO. However, web optimisation is still only one aspect of a well set-up marketing budget.
In reality SEO works even better when combined with a number of other marketing and advertising strategies. In this article you will read about 4 other marketing strategies that work well with SEO and also learn about their main advantages and disadvantages:
SEO and Paid Advertising
Paid advertising, in particular, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising like Google AdWords, Yahoo Overture and Facebook Ads, is a great strategy to produce immediate results. It can start to produce results from day 1. However, you need to consider that pay per click campaigns typically hit a ceiling in form of the budget that is being set – it simply cannot be leveraged beyond the minimum cost per click.
That’s where it works well in tandem with SEO, because an SEO strategy can produce long-term leverage based on some of the information collected by the PPC campaign (keywords, ad copy, traffic numbers, etc). When the results of the SEO campaign start to kick in, the budget can slowly be re-directed to SEO as it is more leveraged and can therefore has a lower the cost per lead.
SEO and Video Marketing
Online video marketing is a great way to build an emotional connection with your audience and improve your presence online. For example, you can film a presentation or an event and then share it online. Now you can connect with your audience without actually having to be there. A disadvantage of video marketing can be the high cost associated with high quality and well produced videos.
In any case, you can have the best quality and well-produced videos on your website, but if nobody sees them they are not going to create an impact for your audience. Therefore creating an optimisation campaign that increases your rankings and exposes your videos to more people will help you get a better return on investment from your marketing budget. On the other hand, if you’ve created an online video channel, such as YouTube or Viddler, to increase exposure for your videos, you can optimize each video so that they show in the search engine and video search results. As a result your videos, your website and your business get even more exposure!
SEO and Social Media
Although many businesses are now starting their own social media campaigns, it remains difficult to prove a good return on investment (ROI) with social media. In many situations, the return is measures in “brand engagement” and “business exposure”. Although undoubtedly important, it is difficult to calculate a return.
However, combining social media with SEO helps to increase the visibility of your business beyond the enclosed social media networks and allows customers to find your business based on keywords rather than connections. That said, SEO and social media work well together, because most search engines, including Google, now consider social evaluation an important vote of confidence for your website.
SEO and Public Relations
Public relations, whether focused online or offline is all about letting people know about your business, creating your brand and adding credibility. Gaining coverage in mainstream news publications, and creating an online buzz with bloggers and social media is a great way to get increase your profile. Often, an increased profile will generate an increased search volume of your business or your industry. And of course you want to be the business that is found.
That’s why SEO and Public Relations are the perfect marriage. They combine to get your business and brand in front of even more people and they work together to leverage the credibility you receive from news coverage, keynote speeches, and other public events.
These are four ways of effectively combining SEO for small business with other marketing techniques.
