Why SEO Is The Most Important Investment You’ll Ever Make

By: Sean Mcvey

Are you trying to figure out how to allocate your firm’s marketing budget? Let me offer some help: Invest in a long-term organic search engine optimization (SEO) campaign and never look back. 

It actually bothers me to see CMOs and marketing directories constantly juggling online marketing priorities when in fact it’s quite clear.  Yes, there are countless marketing channels to explore including social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and many more.  However, one online marketing technique stands alone at the top.  If you want to generate inbound leads, SEO has got to be the foundation of your online marketing plan. 

If you attend our webinars, the graphic below may look familiar.  We surveyed 500 professional services firms and asked them to rate the effectiveness of several online marketing techniques with respect to lead generation.  We then segmented out the results into high growth companies, average growth companies, and a group of 20 online marketing experts that we interviewed separately.  Guess which technique came out on top?
 

Both the experts and high growth companies agreed that SEO is the most effective online lead generation technique.  Why is SEO so important? In a nutshell, more and more of your prospects are looking for professional services by searching Google.  People are looking for a quick and easy way to find service providers and compare benefits.  If your website is not SEO optimized and you are not ranking in competitive spots for important keywords, then you are not even in the game. 

In upcoming posts we will explore how a professional service firm goes about optimizing its website and gaining valuable web traffic over time.  In the meantime, get the full breakdown of the graph above in our free research study—no registration required.