Companies rise and fall by SEO. The technical details of SEO are regular discussion topics on blog, email lists, and conference panels, but how do you ensure that SEO plays a strategic role in your business growth? We’ve settled on 4 key principles.

• Commit to SEO fundamentals early
• Maintain strong SEO tactics through growth periods
• Don’t use SEO for immediate problems
• Focus your SEO energy

Commit to SEO fundamentals early

The fine details of advanced SEO strategy can be mind-bending; the fundamentals, on the other hand, are well-established. This principle is two-pronged: commit to SEO early in your company’s trajectory and commit to the fundamentals. SEO can be a critical part of start-up strategy, and should be in consideration before a website is even built. But most of you are beyond that! So the second idea applies to you: commit to the fundamentals, like correct URL structure and on-page SEO, among other things.

Maintain strong SEO tactics through growth periods

Here’s the most important things for you to understand: SEO builds progressively. You cannot turn your SEO on and off. So let’s say you committed to SEO early and did it well. Now your company is growing and you think you can back off of SEO. You need to proceed with extreme caution. You may be able to spend less time or money on SEO during a stable business season, but you need to keep those fundamentals strong. If you don’t, you will lose SEO and have to rebuild it. Which leads to…

Don’t use SEO for immediate problems

SEO builds progressively. If you’re in a business slump and need to drum up new leads quickly, SEO is not your magic bullet. Improving your search engine rank often takes months. You should be extremely skeptical of anyone who promises immediate SEO results.

Instead, you may benefit from a different digital marketing approach, like digital ads or a full-blown digital campaign. A digital campaign will often deliver more immediate leads while your SEO improves over a longer period.

Focus your SEO energy

There’s a LOT that can be done to improve SEO, and you can attempt to rank your website pages for many keywords. Don’t let the possibilities distract you. Prioritizing your SEO efforts is vital. When we help clients prioritize SEO, we often work first on identifying the pages that drive revenue. We can then protect and increase that revenue through our SEO work.

Want SEO to support your business goals?

We can help with that. We’d love to talk about how you can use strong SEO tactics to protect and improve your revenue. Get in touch.