SEO has always been an important part of internet marketing – even before most people realised it. These days though, there aren’t too many businesses that aren’t aware of SEO and its importance. This leads us of course to the debate of just how important it is to a business, and where it should sit within the business. In years gone by, it has often been the case that companies have tacked SEO on to the back of a marketing team, or as a bit part of the remit of a poor unsuspecting IT manager. We think this is a bit of an outdated approach though, which is why you have to take it very much more seriously indeed.

Measurable SEO

We are now seeing that brands who take SEO seriously are far more successful than those who don’t. Companies who look upon SEO as a measurable way of achieving better results are invariably the companies who sit at the top of the search engine page results, and the companies who have the best ROI. When SEO is part of all aspects of marketing and PR activities, it is at its best.

SEO Across The Board

Good SEO should be used across the board in terms of pinging links, marketing, public relations and all forms of communications, and it should have a very close relation with sales. Your SEO work might start off with the PR and marketing team, but valuable information can be fed back from the sales team in terms of the quality of leads generated.

One Team, Not a Team Within a Team

Unfortunately this is rarely the case in any business. Gone are the days when an SEO team could whittle away the hours using black hat approaches which could be done without the cooperation of the rest of the company, but this doesn’t stop companies from keeping that close knit team together, even if they are using more ethical procedures.

Beware of the Penguin!

The recent Penguin updates to Google have seem a seismic shift towards producing quality content rather than links based SEO, which has to be a fantastic thing for the industry, but it is a case of persuading companies that this also requires a real change in direction in the way that they go about their business. We’re seeing far more companies turning away from what was regarded as pure SEO, towards a more modern approach by having content marketing teams working at creating good content for the internet, and PR teams working to achieve offline success. This is fine, but the important part of this is that a company really needs the two working hand in hand to generate crossover interest. If a PR department has a great result with some offline promotion, it is the most important thing in the world for that to be filtered through to the content marketing team so that they can go foraging for high quality links back from the people who have reacted offline to their campaign.

To put this all in a nutshell, SEO has to be across the board. A company should be thinking SEO all the time, from every department. Only by creating an environment which truly understands the importance of SEO will a company attain the levels of success that are possible with the power of the internet.