Does your 2023 marketing strategy include SEO? Have you considered making changes compared to your 2022 plan? Or maybe you know that you need to make changes but don’t know where to start.
If you only make one change to your marketing strategy for 2023, consider increasing your investment in search engine optimization (SEO). The results can take time to become evident, but they pay off indefinitely.
You start and end marketing campaigns, assess their performance, and start the next one. SEO, by contrast, is “always on.” And like individual marketing campaigns, SEO performance can be tracked and fine-tuned using analytics.
SEO has no downside unless you cannot invest time in it upfront. When it works, it continues to work as long as you track performance and understand what causes fluctuations in your content’s positioning in the search results.
A Long-Term, High-Value Investment
Solely emphasizing SEO cannot take the place of marketing techniques. PPC ads, social media advertising, and other marketing campaigns are essential for getting fast results.
Think of SEO less as marketing and more as a long-term business investment. It turns your content into a valuable business asset that can continue to pay off for as long as that content remains relevant.
Launching marketing campaigns and investing in SEO hedges your bets in a big way. When it’s effective, you can count on people finding your content whether or not you have an ad campaign running.
With good marketing campaigns, you can lead people to your content and potentially address additional needs they discover through reading your content. As a result, the value of both your marketing campaign and your content can increase.
SEO, Content Marketing Work Together
Put SEO and content marketing together, and you get something bigger than the sum of its parts. These two business asset pillars are mutually reinforcing.
SEO drives targeted, relevant traffic to your website. Content marketing builds trust, increases your authority online, and can also improve loyalty.
Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT) are what Google strives to present on its top search results. If SEO corresponds to expertise, Content marketing corresponds to authority and trust.
In other words, SEO brings people to your content, and content marketing keeps them around. SEO gives people the immediate information they want, while content marketing educates, informs, entertains, and empowers them.
When SEO and content marketing work together, they deliver a better user experience. And user experience is a ranking factor in Google’s search rankings.
Helping Your Sales Team Work Better
How aware is your sales team of SEO? They may not know much about it since it isn’t part of the sales process.
Yet SEO is more important than ever to your sales team due to the forces shaping the last few years. COVID is one of those forces.
While we are no longer in lockdown, people are more dependent on making purchase decisions and making the actual purchases online.
Moreover, COVID upended many businesses and industries. Plenty of people changed jobs altogether, and events that sales teams once depended heavily upon, like in-person events, experienced sharp declines in attendance.
How can marketing teams address these new realities?
- They can use PPC campaigns to bring in some quick results.
- They may turn to influencer campaigns that can (but don’t always) raise brand profiles quickly.
- They can resort to questionable tactics like buying links. However, these do more harm than good in the long run and should be avoided.
- They can invest in SEO.
Good SEO brings in website traffic. Website traffic brings in leads, and the sales team knows precisely how to handle leads. And unlike PPC campaigns and influencer marketing, it has no expiration date.
SEO Is Evolving to Better Meet Needs
How people use the web constantly changes. For this reason, SEO evolves all the time. The following table shows some outdated and updated SEO principles.
| That Was Then | This Is Now |
| Using SEO strictly for ranking purposes | Using it to maximize content performance based on searcher intent |
| Mobile-first | Mobile-fast. If your site is slow on mobile, your search rankings can suffer. |
| Focus on local search | Focus on in-store and online shopping due to changed habits |
| Text search | Voice, image, and other types of search |
| Data-gathering | Using data for functional automation online |
The entries in this table will continue to evolve as people start using the web in new ways. A solid strategy accounts for algorithm changes and monitors website data frequently to ensure performance remains up to scratch.
In other words, while SEO is a long-term investment, it is far from static. Strategies must be able to evolve if long-term benefits are to continue.
Strategies and Benefits
The following table summarizes various strategies and the benefits you can expect from them in 2023:
| Strategies | Benefits |
| Optimizing website content | Higher search engine ranking, better visibility |
| Investing in UX improvements | Better performance on mobile and desktop |
| Creating content based onWhat people search forSearch intentSearcher pain points | Better performance throughout the funnel: Higher ranking/visibility (top of funnel)“They understand me!” (middle of funnel)“They can address my problem! (bottom of funnel) |
| Pairing SEO with content marketing | Getting people in the website “door,” keeping them on the site, and providing more leads for sales |
| Monitoring analytics and search algorithm updates | More consistency, less fluctuation in search engine ranking |
SEO Is a Solid Foundation for Marketing
If you invest in SEO in 2023, you’re investing in all aspects of marketing. A website that performs well, attracts new visitors, and keeps existing customers coming back helps your other marketing efforts work better.
By contrast, you can get quick results if you focus on a single aspect of marketing, like search ads. However, those results go away as soon as a campaign ends.
Ideally, you would have the resources to boost advertising campaigns and invest in SEO. But not every business has the resources to do that. If you have to choose, SEO is the way to go.
Set up a call with our team if your website isn’t performing as well as you would like it to. We’re in the business of building SEO-enriched websites and planning digital marketing strategies that work together to get optimum results.
Let’s talk about your marketing and website goals for 2023. We would love to help you make it your best year ever.