What Do You Need To Balance When Doing SEO?
SEO is an essential component of any comprehensive marketing strategy. Good SEO’s potential positive impact is unquestionable. However, for the vast majority of businesses, SEO is only one of several factors you must consider when deciding what adjustments or updates to make to your website.
Yes, adhering to SEO best practices typically has a positive effect on factors such as user experience, conversion rates, and site performance. However, it is also possible for well-intended SEO to result in unintended outcomes.
You should always consider how alterations will affect your website and its users, as well as budgetary and time constraints.
Companies cannot achieve effective SEO without harmonizing numerous elements, such as budgets, technical skills, team resources, and interconnected marketing channels. The finest SEO teams are collaborative and willing to make concessions when necessary to achieve the long-term objectives of the organization.
Here are some factors to consider when implementing SEO adjustments: Carefully weigh your efforts against these factors in order to mitigate the associated risks and avoid negative outcomes.
Similar Keywords
Considering other keywords may seem like a frivolous recommendation when discussing SEO, but it is essential.
Consider your other keywords before optimizing a page for a specific keyword. If you optimize your page for a particular term or topic, it may become less optimized for something else. If your page already ranks well for a key term that generates high-quality, high-converting traffic, you must ensure that any adjustments you make do not negatively affect these rankings. Before making any changes, review Google Search Console to determine which keywords drive traffic to your site and which content you’re contemplating optimizing.
Conversion Effort
The conversion of website visitors into leads or customers is an essential objective for most websites. It is essential to consider (and then monitor) the impact of SEO changes on conversion rates when implementing changes. If your change increases traffic by 10% but decreases conversions by 50%, it was probably a blunder.
A change of this nature could involve placing too much content at the top of a page, which forces products or conversion forms further down the page. Altering the language of your page headings is an additional example.
If you’re working on an important page with the potential for a drop in conversion rate, you may want to evaluate the impact of your proposed changes using a conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool such as Google Optimize before making them permanent.
Performance and User Experience
Some search engine optimizations may also have unintended effects on user experience metrics such as site speed and mobile compatibility. For instance, video can be excellent for SEO, as it keeps visitors on the page longer and provides valuable content. However, if implemented improperly, videos can delay page load times. And if a video plays automatically, it may irritate users to the point where they leave the website. Before making significant adjustments, it is advisable to establish a baseline for key metrics such as page load speed and user engagement.
AdWords, Social Media, and Other Channels of Marketing
The majority of the time, SEO is not the only source of website traffic. If your website receives traffic from paid media channels, email marketing campaigns, SMS, social media, or other sources, you should consider these sources prior to implementing significant SEO changes. This is particularly true when multiple channels direct traffic to the same pages.
Some changes, such as updating a URL or redirecting a page, may have an apparent effect. Changing the URL that other channels are using in ads or email links is plainly problematic. However, lesser modifications, such as headline updates, may also affect an advertisement’s quality score. Changes may also result in a discrepancy between what a user reads in an email and what they see on the website.
This does not imply that SEO efforts should take a back place to other marketing initiatives or that every constraint requires a compromise. Occasionally, an SEO strategy should take precedence! Good marketing teams are responsible for determining the most effective strategy through collaboration.
Budget Constraints
Despite the fact that the majority of SEO efforts can be implemented at a relatively low cost, some SEO initiatives can be expensive to implement. Switching to a new content management system, incorporating paid extensions, and redesigning a landing page can be costly. You will need to weigh the costs of an update against its potential effect on sales or conversions.
Engineering Capabilities
Sadly, not all websites and content management systems have identical capabilities. The features or capabilities of your website may occasionally place restrictions on you. For instance, it may not be possible to incorporate custom code or schema markup.
Team Accessibility and Timing
Certain SEO strategies necessitate the participation of non-SEO team members, such as copywriters, designers, and developers, or external agencies. Creating a new landing page, for instance, may require design elements from a designer. If your design resources are occupied creating other assets, the implementation of your project could be delayed. Similarly, SEO teams frequently collaborate with developers who may be tasked with implementing more technical requirements. Development resources are frequently constrained, and SEO requests can consume time that would otherwise be spent on product updates, enhancements, or issue fixes.
Opportunity Expense
SEO is all about setting priorities. Numerous ranking factors can be optimized indefinitely. Great marketers are characterized by their ability to identify the most significant and impactful duties to prioritize.
A technical site audit may uncover hundreds or thousands of minor “best practice” optimizations (image size, alt text, canonicals, metadata, etc.). In reality, however, some of these optimizations will waste time and have little impact. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it is best to prioritize the most important tasks and add additional tasks as needed. The “Hierarchy of SEO needs” graphic provided by Moz.com can be used as a guide for prioritizing SEO activities.
SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for achieving lasting success. If SEO is not already part of your digital marketing strategy, you should undoubtedly include it. However, SEO, like any other marketing channel, should not be your organization’s sole focus.
Marketers need to remember that the best results are achieved when all parties can align on common objectives and work together, regardless of the constraints. No marketing channel should be entirely independent or isolated from the others. Similarly, every team member and department within an organization should be aware of how their respective efforts influence one another. The greater an organization’s ability to achieve these objectives, the more effective it will be at achieving its objectives!
