Rethinking SEO as a channel
1st June, 2024
The more mature that SEO becomes, the less it looks and behaves like an acquisition channel – and continuing to treat it like one can be a route to failure.
Unlike conventional marketing channels, SEO rarely has a directly measurable connection between spend and outcome. There are no ROI or attribution models that’ll estimate the revenue you’ll generate by making your content “more helpful”, or by improving your page speed. There are no ‘campaigns’ that you can plan, run and evaluate in isolation. There are no discrete ‘tactics’ that you can apply, other than to provide a ‘better result’ than everybody else.
It’s also getting harder to show iterative progress, as it gets harder to make incremental (or any) headway in the SERPs against giants like Amazon, Reddit, and Google’s own properties. You can’t “test” SEO with a small budget, to prove opportunity, because anything less than being “the best” delivers no impact.
Even the most sophisticated attribution modelling struggles to join the dots between organic traffic and business outcomes, due to the long, complex journeys, which unfold across multiple devices, touch-points and time periods as users conduct research and make decisions.
All of this means that getting buy-in and a budget to run SEO like an acquisition channel – when that money might be more accountability spent in other channels – is increasingly difficult.
We can’t solve that attribution problem, no matter how hard we dream. We no longer have a simple ecosystem, keyword-level data, or an ecosystem compromised simply of ten blue links. We no longer understand or control the outcomes of our activity. If we continue to try to manage and budget for SEO as if it behaves like (but significantly less reliably than) other marketing channels, we’ll continue to struggle to get access to grown-up budgets or conversations.
One way that we might solve this mismatch in expectations is by reframing the responsibilities of the ‘channel’ from conversion and revenue, to influence and preference. Sophisticated SEO strategies focus not on clicks or conversions from landing pages and articles, but on improving the propensity of an audience to recognize and choose our brands when they’re in the “messy middle” of expanding and contracting consideration sets.
When people search, we can aim to positively influence their perception of our brand, so that they’re more inclined to choose us when they become problem-aware and seek out solutions. When we can influence what users see, read, and believe, there are more nuanced and effective ways to leverage that than shouting “buy now!” at them. We might, instead, simply ask, “How can we help?”.
Undoubtedly, SEO is getting harder. But more often than not, that’s because our organisations continue to structure, budget, and manage it in a way that simply doesn’t make sense in our evolving environment.
If we want to succeed with SEO, we must stop treating it like PPC, and start using it to win the hearts and minds of our audiences – before they’re at the point of purchase. That’s a hard sell, for sure, but the alternative is to see diminishing returns from the “channel” as competitors win hearts and minds against search results that you’re not even present in. Are you brave enough to outgrow needing to forecast and model the explicit commercial outcome of every effort and opportunity?
