We’veheard everything from “SEO is dead” to “there’s no value in SEO” over the past year.  By not engaging in SEO it is costing you or your client precious dollars of their marketing budget.  Many people have the tendency to view SEO in a silo and not leverage our keyword, demographic and geographical research for other marketing tactics.  If the keyword is relevant to your target audience and is generating conversions, why wouldn’t the same information be applicable to social media, email marketing, content development, or web design?  In the long-run, the lack of SEO is costing you time, money, and marketing efficiencies. 

Web Design for Your Personas or Target Audience
Contrary to the beliefsof many business owners and marketing professionals, SEO doesn’t start when the website is in development.  It should be a part of the initial planning stages and part of the concepts for the content outline, wireframes, and functional requirements as well as aligned to the personas your agency developed.  A persona is fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way. The initial keyword research would have provided insightsinto what information customers were looking for, what functionality is needed to obtain the information easily, and the design that would resonate with the target audience best.

In general, web designers or developers are not marketing professionals (although some of them are capable).  There might be a disconnect between the marketing strategy and the strategic direction of the website. Aligning the marketing strategy with the web design process to focus on the personas, goals, and objectives is increasingly important as well as the integration of marketing tactics and the measurement of effectiveness.  Sometimes the artistic and aesthetic value can overshadow the overall goals and objectives.  If the marketing strategy and web design strategy are aligned with the business goals and objectives, it will reduce the possibility that the artistic value will overshadow and exclude valuable search engine optimization components.  The overall impact should mean a better user experience, particularly for your core personas & target audience, increased user engagement, and relevant organic search traffic.  The content has an increasedprobability of being relevant to the target audience and f being shared through social media.  This increases referral traffic from social media, and the relevant organic search traffic should generate leads and reduce your overall cost-per-acquisition/cost-per-lead.

SEO’s Impact on Pay per Click (PPC), Quality Score, and Cost per Lead
SEO is still important to Pay per Click advertising and the overall search engine strategy.  If your website is optimized for relevant keywords, then your business may not need to allocate a PPC budget for those keywords and phrases.This allows the business to reallocate marketing dollars to alternative marketing tactics.

The Quality Score is the Great Equalizer Within the Pay per Click Space
Most search engine ad systems are designed to match the users' needs as closely as possible with the most relevant ads.  Landing pages that implement SEO best practices will yield better landing pages which translates to lower cost per click, lower cost per conversions, and lower cost-per-impression.  Not to mention the assumptions that good SEO generally leads to better navigation on your website and a better user experience for your customers or prospects.  This should lead to improvements with the visitor metrics and the likelihood of a lead or conversion.

Keyword Targeting for Email Marketing Effectiveness
Email Marketing is still an effective tactic which should include keywords that are consistent with your SEO campaign.  By implementing relevant and targeted keywords that are not only consistent with your products/services but also your demographics and geographic locations will help to improve open rates, click-through rates, sharing of emails, and generate leads.  The most interesting opportunity for keyword insertion into Email Marketing is within the subject line and content for link building.  The ability to implement keywords into the subject line should improve your open rates as long as the keywords are relevant to target audience.  In some cases, email software providers can implement subject line testing to improve the open rates and test new keywords within the subject line. 

Keyword insertion within the body copy of email promotions generally increases traffic to other marketing assets such as YouTube, Blogs, etc.   It also provides an opportunity to hyperlink to relevant content and developslink building.  With increased open rates from subject line testing and relevant content, this will improve the effectiveness of your email marketing communication, reduce the cost per lead, and improve return-on-investment.

Get Quality Leads & Conversions with Keyword Research & Leverage Finding within Marketing Tactics
With SEO and the consistent usage of keywords & phrases in the marketing communication lead generation and conversions will improve your marketing effectiveness and the ability to reduce cost.  Effective SEO goes beyond the keywords and meta descriptions. It will reinforce the website design and make it easier for customers to navigateyour website which will improve lead generation. 

If the keywords are generating organic search traffic with your target audience, it will also improve the CTR for email promotions, help to identify PPC and content development opportunities to drive prospects to your business.  Keyword Tools such as Ad Intelligence will provide insight into demographics, geographic locations, and keyword search volume.  You can leverage this information to improve SEO, email marketing, as well as search engine marketing (SEM).  Similar tools will help to identify emerging trends in search behavior and opportunities to generate additional traffic.       

The keywords used will reinforce the terminology to your target audience.  If implemented effectively, your prospective customers should increase their search queries for broad and long-tail your keywords. Research shows that prospective customers generally receive a piece of marketing materials and then search for additional information.  An effective SEO campaign will position your product or service offerings well for this audience, reduce acquisition cost, and improve internal marketing efficiencies.  Tables 2&3 demonstrations the difference in ROI for a campaign that included compared to a campaign that did not included SEO.

Conclusion
As I’ve always said, SEO is not just important from a keyword ranking prospective.Its value also lies in its ability to improve the website user experienceand on-site metrics.You can leverage the insights from keyword research and apply them to other marketing tactics.  The ability to take what has been learned via keyword research and testing and apply it to other marketing tactics is important for reducing cost and creating marketing efficiencies.  Regardless of our marketing roles, it’s a necessity to demonstrate return-on-investment and the value of our work.  The ability to communicate insights across various channels provides us with the opportunity beyond keyword ranking.  It provides you with information to leverage online &through more traditional marketing tactics to generate leads and revenue growth for clients. 

By leveraging the keyword research from your SEO campaign, you will be able to generate more relevant search traffic.  In addition, you can use the keyword findings to improve PPC campaign effectiveness.  The implementation of A/B testing for PPC campaigns will reduce the cost-per-click and provide direction on landing page optimization.  This will improve the effectiveness of your marketing budget, generate a higher ROI, and boost theability to reallocate resources.