There are not that many CMOs with a budget that allows them to target all different types of searches to reach the audience. But with SEO, they can.

By: Per Pettersson on February 27, 2024 | Reading time: 5 minutes

A Chief Marketing Officer is responsible for developing and implementing the organization’s marketing strategy, which must be aligned with the overall goals, brand message, and budget. How should new products be positioned, launched, and marketed? Are there any market trends, customer behaviors, or competitor insights that need to be considered?

That’s quite a lot.

As an experienced SEO consultant, I can tell you that the benefits of having an SEO strategy and operational support are too good not to talk about more often. Just in case you missed out on the opportunities that come with search engine optimization.

Organic traffic or paid?

When you and I go to Google or Bing and search for a nearby restaurant or a product, we get a search result with both organic and paid results. All paid results are labeled with “ads” or “shopping” while the rest is usually referred to as the organic results. And this is where your SEO consultant spends all their time.

Of course, the local results, i.e., maps, can be optimized to suit your marketing efforts. The pages that show up for which searches can also be optimized, as long as we have a marketing strategy that highlights the way forward.

Reach the whole customer journey

Paying for search traffic is great, but should focus mainly on converting potential customers to paying customers. No one wants to spend their marketing budget on building awareness about a product range if we’re not making money on our products.

SEO is the full funnel approach, compared to paid advertising.

When approaching SEO work, content on the website should respond to the audience no matter at what stage in their customer journey they are:

Someone who is searching for “computers” might be looking into a gaming computer, a laptop for work, or just as well as parts for their existing computer. It is a very broad and generic search, but still something that the website can and should work towards being exposed for.

Someone who is searching for a “gaming computer” is more prone to actually doing research on what to buy, or already ready to buy and browsing around the web to find a good deal.

Someone who is searching for a “Lenovo gaming computer X99” has already made up their mind, and they are more likely to buy now.

Someone who is searching for “turn off computer LED lights” might already own our specific gaming computers, and we should let them know how they can tweak and customize their product.

There are not that many CMOs with a budget that allows them to target all different types of searches to reach the audience. But with SEO, they can.

Invest now, return later

Setting up operational SEO support or kickstarting an SEO project does not create change overnight. The first activity is always to make sure that the website itself has the capabilities from a performance perspective, i.e., loading relatively fast, and that produced content can be published and structured in a logical fashion across pages to ensure search engines understand what this organization is offering.

As soon as a website or content changes happen, the work is measurable and should be visualized for the whole organization. Investing time and effort to make changes without any impact indicates that we are either not doing a great job or that we need to work even more due to competitors doing the same work, or, which can happen, the audience itself has shifted their interest or even changed their search behavior.

SEO as the game-changer

All SEO work is based on data. Search data, which is also used for paid advertising, offers great insights into how humans use words in search engines and whether interest is peaking or on a steady decline.

This is data that offers market insights, not just numbers that should steer what content to produce on a specific market and language.

Writing this out of experience, I have seen organizations call their products something completely different from what the audience is calling them. Thus, searching with different words than what the website is using and marketing.

Both big and small SEO engagements create impact.

Some organizations have hungry teams ready to show which impact they can have on the revenue stream. Some have little to none.

Align the organization’s capabilities to dedicate time and effort to the overall business goals, and it comes down to either “run now with the help from multiple people” or “walk fast with support”.

Just don’t miss out on what SEO brings to the table in terms of revenue and marketing possibilities. And if you have any thoughts, reach out, and let’s get those thoughts turned into actions by yourself or with support.

About the author

Per Pettersson is a Senior SEO Manager with 13 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. He is part of the Curamando SEO and Content team, working with organizations to get the most out of their search marketing efforts and internal capabilities.