SEO is a fantastic web marketing strategy. Getting top rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for those juicy target keyword phrases can mean floods of pre-qualified traffic to your website each day. Plus, top search engine rankings often bring along a lot of secondary bonuses — authority, positioning, increased trust, etc etc. Needless to say, hitting page one of Google search can do a lot for your business. But even if your SEO strategy is working, it’s critical that you don’t make the classic mistake of ignoring all other web marketing channels and developing a kind of SEO tunnel vision.
Are You Tracking Lead Sources?
The greatest sign that you’re relying too much on SEO is organic search is your number one lead source. Hopefully you’re tracking lead sources with a tool like Infusionsoft. This is critical because if your top rankings suddenly disappear, you’ll have to fight tooth-and-nail to keep your lead generation machine pumping new blood into your business.
Here are some other places you should be regularly mining new leads into your business besides SEO:
- Social Media
- Referrals
- Affiliates
- PPC
- Social Ads
- Webinars
- Direct Mail
Why SEO Is A Dangerous Lead Source
The trouble with SEO is it’s constantly changing. To be fair, the same can be said of many other marketing channels too. But all too often I meet very successful small business owners and entrepreneurs who are striking gold with search engine rankings one day only to find their business on the rocks the next.
Google is constantly updating its algorithm and making changes to how it organizes search engine results pages (SERPs). What works today could suddenly not work tomorrow. All of this makes SEO and top search rankings tenuous at best.
But perhaps more importantly, top Google rankings doesn’t necessarily equal lots of leads and customers. Just the other day, I had a conversation with one of our clients who recently achieved #1 placement for several very attractive keyword phrases in his marketplace. His traffic went up as a result, but his business did not.
As I explained to him, top search engine rankings (and even traffic from those rankings) is just the beginning. You still need to have a wide range of marketing tools in place to convert visitors into leads, capture data from those leads, and move those leads down a lead-to-customer path.
SEO alone might have worked 3-5 years ago. Today, it’s just a fraction of what you need to be successful online.
