Why Rankings Don’t Matter

Search engine rankings alone won’t bring you success. I’m not saying that to diminish how important search engine visibility is for finding new customers. My point is that SEO is only one piece of a very large and complex online marketing puzzle.

I would love to say that SEO is the be-all-end-all online marketing strategy. However, I can admit that SEO efforts don’t exist in a vacuum. Social media marketing, content development and link building intertwine with on-site SEO and can impact how search engines rank your site.

Additionally, there are times when SEO isn’t the best approach to meet business goals. Sometimes you need fast results, like you can get with pay per click advertising. Sometimes you need to go a step farther by reaching out to past customers through email marketing.

Rankings alone won’t necessarily bring you more business. It’s possible to rank for a keyword that doesn’t send the right kind of traffic (converting traffic) to your site. You can also rank for a keyword that no one searches for, and doesn’t bring traffic at all.

Similarly, focusing randomly on whatever is the hottest online trend won’t always get results. Many companies are hopping on the “social media” bandwagon now, usually without a firm goal or plan in place. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for trying things, but time is valuable and we all need to make the most of how we spend it.

So what’s the most effective online marketing strategy? There is no shortage of tactics to try. You can choose from SEO, blogging, pay per click, video, content distribution, social media, link building, press release distribution, article marketing, video, local search, email marketing, and targeted directory listings (just to name a few.)

What combination of these tactics is the best? It depends on your customers and business goals. Focus first on your customer. Get to know who your customers are, where they spend their time online, what you can do to make their lives better. It’s about what you can do for them, not what they can buy from you.

Once you have your customer at the center of your marketing efforts, you’ll be able to plan an integrated online marketing strategy that combines different online marketing tactics that gets results.

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