Research Shows Search Engines Deliver Best Marketing ROI

What marketing strategies deliver the best ROI?

The Open Forum has a great article today that polled top senior marketers, and asked them a very simple question:

“What cWhatomponents of their current digital marketing programs—search, email, display advertising, social networking, and mobile advertising—delivered the best results?”

Here’s graph showing the results:

How Is Your Search Marketing?

Most businesses I speak to have no search marketing efforts currently underway.  Looking at the data above, it would seem that search marketing would be at the forefront of any business marketing campaign.

However, that’s just not the case.

A lot of the same businesses I speak with still have an old, static, HTML website (non CMS website).  The problem ultimately is that no efforts are being initiated to leverage the power of search.

There is no question that the majority of people use search engines to quickly find businesses, products, and services.

Search engines such as Google are selected as the primary source to find business even over the more traditional platforms like the Yellow Pages, TV ads, and newpapers.

The problem with having an old static website is that the pages of your site are more than likely never going to be found in Google.  And if you aren’t found in Google, then why even have a site in the first place?

How To Get Found In Search Engines

This is a fair question.  In order to have an effective search engine marketing strategy, you probably should know how to get found in the search engines to begin with.

One of the best ways that I’ve found to achieve high levels of exposure in search engines like Google is through an active blog.

Google loves to crawl and index  A LOT of freshly updated content, and a blog delivers this better than any other platform.

Follow our series on WordPress SEO Tips for more information about how to blog effectively.

When you blog about your business, products, and services – providing informative content, how to’s, and answering your customer’s questions – you are in essence giving your business a voice on the web.

A blog can generate massive amounts of exposure in the Google search results because of the following:

1. Each blog post and crawled, indexed, and ranked by Google as it’s own individual page.  So let’s say you’re writing 3 blog posts a week.  Within just 4 short weeks, you’ll have 12 new pages of content – about your business, products, and services – in the Google search results.
2. Google favors freshly updated content.  The opposite is true as well – Google does not favor content that is not updated regularly.  This brings us full circle back to the problem with your old, static website.
3. Google will revisit, re-crawl, and re-index a site that is updated regularly.  There is no need to revisit a site that hasn’t been updated in the past year – there is no new content to index.  However, a site that is updated frequently will keep the Google bots return on a regular basis.  This also helps increase intangible indicators of value such as PageRank.

The Take A Way

1) Understand that search engine marketing is currently delivering the best return on investment for online marketers.

2) You can get exposure in search engines basically one of two ways:  1 – you can pay for it with Google Adwords, which is a very costly endeavor, or 2 – you can achieve massive online exposure in Google search engines through the use of a blog.

3) A blog can give you a massive amount of leverage in your search engine marketing endeavors.  There are certainly more reasons why Google favors a blog over a static website, and through the process of writing fresh content for your blog, you can quickly achieve a dominant position in Google.