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This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter, Raisin Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week, subscribe here.
Is this an anti-SEO newsletter? A reader asked us this recently, and we can see why.
Past newsletter subject lines and headlines have included, uh:
They don’t exactly make SEO sound sexy.
But at MarketerHire, we’re actually investing in SEO content right now. This week, we talked with our director of marketing, Tracey Wallace, about why.
SEO gets your brand… moist.
Over-reliance on performance marketing is like trying to clean with a bone-dry sponge, Wallace said.
Without efforts like SEO wetting your brand-sponge, “it's going to be a lot more expensive for you to convert people [and] to keep people” with performance and lifecycle marketing.
SEO cuts long-term costs (and increases ROI).
For a company “far too heavily reliant on paid digital and wanting to reduce their costs,” SEO can be the answer.
After consistent investment for at least a year, the return on spend can far exceed paid digital’s. Think 12X, not 5X.
SEO can 100X blog traffic.
Wallace saw this firsthand as editor in chief at BigCommerce. When the content and SEO teams merged under her leadership, the blog turned into a powerhouse. Traffic grew 100X YoY — for several years.
Skipping SEO can take you to a weird place.
Wallace once worked with a magazine that ignored SEO — and got most of their organic search traffic from a random story about butts.
Not ideal for brand awareness.
SEO content can do quadruple duty.
The average #1 search result is nearly three years old. But you don’t need to wait that long to see benefits from SEO content.
If you’re writing to keywords tightly tied to your brand, you can repurpose it on social, in nurture emails and even in case studies, Wallace noted.
The latest data actually shows SEO’s power.
Yes, 90% of web content gets no organic search traffic. That’s because it needs to be optimized by pros.
“It is not just ‘Publish it and they will come,’” Wallace said.
And yes, zero-click Google searches are on the rise — but landing featured snippets still gets you brand impressions, Wallace noted. They wet your sponge.
Our takeaway?
SEO is marketing’s marshmallow test. It takes consistency and an appropriate strategy — but tolerate delayed gratification, and it pays major dividends.
On the cookie-less internet, it’s only going to become a more important “investment in the future.”