L et’s start by playing the hypothetical game of two halves. So you have a business and you’re feeling a little fancy with growing what you started, so you contract a social media vendor to set up and run content to the appropriate social channels during the first half of the game. In the second half, you switch it up and pay for an email list along with an email client system such as Constant Contact to push out mass promotions hoping to generate leads. With time expired, you look at the score (ROI) to see if you won – but the box score isn’t very clear.

So you now call us to break down the stats - and determine whether you had the right in-game strategy during both halves to claim victory. Well, because you’re striving to be the best, you’re competing against the best. So we unfortunately inform you that your choice of strategy lost the game. Why?! How? You ask, after spending so much time and resources in your planning?

When you’re competing against the best, you have to take the best approach to win. When it comes to generating cold leads online, there’s NO marketing mechanism more effective than search engine optimization. (SEO) We encourage all of our customers to heavily invest their marketing resources towards SEO for the very reasons below that will have you salivating if you’re a fan of new business:

1. 93% of all online discoveries start from Google/Bing searches
2. Top search results receive 33% of clicks
3. Google/Bing searches are the #1 driver of traffic to websites
4. On Google, 18% clicks go to the #1 position, 10% go to the #2, and 7% go to #3.
5. 91% of internet users rely on search
6. 75% of search users never scroll past the first page
7. Beating social media by 300%, search engines are the #1 traffic driver to websites

SEO determines where your website ranks when people conduct a search on Google using keywords relative to your product, business or industry. For example, if you own a shoe boutique in Downtown Chicago, and I type in “shoes in Chicago” “or ”best place to buy shoes,” SEO will dictate whether you rank first, second, third, or not at all within my search. The results of my search, aka the Search Engine Page Results (SERP) can make or break your lead generation online.

So now knowing this, you confidently head to your second hypothetical game of two halves. During the first half, you realize you have not a clue of any SEO plays (best practices) to run, let alone how to run them. So you give us a call and ask us which strategies to implement and how. We tell you to take a full timeout and wait for us to get to the sidelines.

We hypothetically haven’t made it down yet, so stay tuned for our next post when we do..