The power of SEO in a changing landscape
The power of SEO in a changing landscape
Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash
Marketing trends come and go, but there are certain strategies that are in it for the long run — or at least for the next handful of years.
Today, we’re digging into how to best convey the value of SEO to your team, plus the major distinctions between artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that you need to know for your business.
Today’s agenda:
🤔 What’s the true value of SEO?
🤖 How AI is overshadowing ML’s practicality
☁️ Is a “marketing climate change” in progress?
💼 Briefly — our quick news roundup
⏱️ Up & coming
Don’t be the one overlooking SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is worth the investment, and we’re going to help you convince your team — assuming that you’re not the one overlooking it in your company.
🔑 Here are the key things to understand about SEO and why it’s essential to your 2023 lead generation strategy:
Your target audience is searching the web right now for information about the services/products you provide
SEO strategies help your website/content perform better in search engine results by effectively targeting the right audiences
Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to boost the number of qualified leads coming from search, resulting in more conversions and more revenue
Your competition is leveraging SEO and grabbing traffic that could be yours — just perform a simple search for the services you provide and see who pops up
PPC ads offer “instant gratification” — but what about when those ads are turned off? SEO is consistently generating traffic organically
The bottom line: SEO is a long-term strategy that will surely have its ups and downs, but quality content upfront will ensure years of qualified leads to come.
In fact, you can prove it: Optimize a piece of content and track the traffic.
Top tips for traffic dips
Check for algorithm updates
Check periods of lows vs highs
Determine which pages/search terms have lost traffic
Check the search results for those terms (who is ranking now, and why?)
The search results will reveal a lot about what’s going on — has the intent behind a user’s search changed? Is the competition displaying the information in a better or more clear format?
You can use this information to improve your content.
We have to distinguish AI vs ML
Eric Siegel is a former Columbia University professor who helps companies deploy machine learning, and he says that ML is getting lost in the “glitz” of AI.
While major AI news is cycling every single day, Siegel writes that for most ML projects, AI “overly inflates expectations and distracts from the precise way ML will improve business operations.”
👉 Machine learning is designed to make existing business operations more efficient by issuing “actionable predictions” — for example, which customers are most likely to cancel, or which credit card transactions are fraudulent
👉 AI, on the other hand, is a vague term that doesn’t refer to any certain method or value proposition — and it “overpromises” what ML can do
The solution? Differentiating AI from ML, so ML doesn’t have to suffer from the same “hype waves” as its counterpart.
ICYMI: Subscribe to our Premium Membership to read our deep dive into AI and machine learning use cases for sales operations.
Marketing’s evolution in 2023
A recent Gartner survey found that 71% of CMOs think they lack the budget to fully execute their strategies in 2023, and 75% say they also are facing increased pressure to “do more with less.”
The top digital channels to get an investment boost this year include:
Social advertising
Digital video advertising
Influencer marketing
Content Marketing Institute’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose wonders if these results point to a “marketing climate change,” where marketers are finding greater success via influencers over search.
According to CMI, marketers tend to spend more time on new tech than creating things of value, which slows the process.
⭕ We’ve come full circle: Instead of chasing the latest tech when budgets are slim, focus on long-term investments, results, and strategies that work (i.e. SEO).
Briefly
🤖 Ideas that make AI “less evil” in a world that’s facing the reality of what this tech can do
💵 May’s U.S. payrolls report exceeds expectations in a resilient labor market
🐦 Twitter is now only worth one-third what Elon Musk paid for it
🏚️ More than a quarter of U.S. homeowners fall into the “house poor” category — and many are in Florida and California
💻 How Wix is changing how websites are built, and what you need to know
Up & Coming
Fears of a recession in 2023 are crumbling because the job market is too strong, economists say — and we are running out of time for it to happen, anyway.
While they acknowledge that things still could take a quick turn, the odds are increasing that it could now happen in 2024.