Größere Unternehmen investieren jetzt in SEO, warum?
We discuss the exciting development that
medium-sized companies and corporations in the DACH region have increasingly entered SEO and content marketing over the last 6 to 9 months
, and speculate, based on customer statements and
own theories, what the reasons for this are. Have fun! I had already briefly teased this development
in the episode about SEO 2023. Everyone who works with companies
or like us in B2B knows: Small companies are under pressure,
have to reduce investments, sometimes even have to completely restructure
in order to survive the current situation. And at the same time, what we notice extremely
and also notice agencies that we are friends with is: Larger and therefore somewhat more sluggish
companies are now fully involved in SEO and content marketing, and by that I really mean
the classic industry, mechanical engineering, etc.
But really, everything
Medium-sized companies, corporations, etc. And the most amazing thing for someone who
has been involved in SEO since 2009 is: For most people, it is… Well, they obviously know SEO if they
invest in SEO, but it is the first real touchpoint with SEO and the
You can gain your first experience with SEO with us. So super exciting. And before we
go into depth, I want to briefly summarize why SEO
is a topic for medium-sized companies and corporations right now. In the DACH region and worldwide, we are currently experiencing
the change from growth at any price and cheap money to:
It's about efficiency and maximizing value.
And at the same time we have
the huge topic of digitalization in the DACH region. And now some who watch the channel will say:
"Digitization – everything is digital for me." Yes, but if you
look at the statistics for Germany, for example, you can see that small and medium-sized businesses are almost
never digitized. And the pandemic seems to have shaken them up in a way
, or all these offensives. In any case, they are now moving. And in a situation where there is now less
liquidity, where efficiency is at stake, etc. What good does SEO do in a situation like this? And that's where we go deep. But it helps to save resources and invest more efficiently
, offers deep insights into the customer psyche and thus avoids
misallocations and bad investments. It increases brand visibility,
brand equity and market understanding. And what everyone who does SEO knows: It scales
highly relevant traffic and thus online sales. And now let's look at how SEO does it
and really get into the nitty gritty so maybe you can understand these developments
based on testimonials from customers and my theories. So. Number 1: Organic search
is growing independently of the economy.
We already discussed in this episode that organic search is growing. We summarize the most important of them
again. Organic search is the largest controllable
online marketing channel in terms of web traffic. If we take a quick look at some statistics
that ahrefs has compiled: The most exciting thing for me is always, "53.3% of
all website traffic comes from organic search". That means we can see very clearly: SEO is by far the biggest channel. And even though we're going from 2021 to liquidity,
liquidity, liquidity to 2022 – everything is being siphoned off – searches are
up 20% again, according to BrightEdge. And 73% of clicks go
to organic results and the rest go to ads, maps, images, and videos. What's more,
the channel scales. Of course, until you've met the demand or
potential, then logically it can't scale anymore,
because then there's no more demand, because you're building something, and I
think that's the biggest argument for SEO: it's not like that, me pour something
in and get something out, and when I stop pouring in, it's over,
then nothing comes out. It's like this: I build something up, it accumulates.
So like I said, the most important thing in life I believe is the compound effect and SEO
is the embodiment of the compound effect. And what can come out of that is
something like this little customer who left us around September
because of just liquidity crunch. It's off. We made sure
that the site is well-aligned to search and that
everything is positioned correctly. We built content,
built links and boom! So the curve is going up. This is what an SEO curve
should look like, and it shows very nicely: hey, SEO scales. So to explain
the proportionality between the different channels again for those who don't know,
I always love this example – the ship example. This means that our goal is for
the ship to travel as quickly as possible. The wind is the demand, SEO is the sail. That means we can make the sail bigger
and tighter and thus attract more demand.
Paid is the engine. We can turn on paid. As long as we invest money,
we get something out. Then we have all the steering work:
email and social. And of course, what ultimately
is the most important thing, more important than SEO: branding. The current pulls us along. The stronger
our brand, the easier everything is, the better each channel works, and the
better the company itself works. So. Number 2, and this is probably now the favorite point of CMOs at
midsize and large companies: SEO can streamline marketing budgets. The reality in most larger
DACH companies is definitely: Content is produced, somehow
in a blog or whatever, by one person or several
departments, whatever. They discuss this with each other, do
n't look at the customer's point of view, but discuss: "We think we need this
content", and shoot out this content. It's useless. Well, zero. This content will not be found,
will not be seen, will not be read. Or they have a completely different topic,
namely you leave the field to others, because digitization is not your topic.
And in summary one can say: Very often content strategies are not
developed based on data and the performance of content is not measured,
because otherwise someone would notice that it is not working and
turn the whole thing off as quickly as possible. We are often these bad guys. But imagine that in any
other area of the company, they would all
be fired effective immediately. And SEO data is interesting for almost everyone,
i.e. for every department, but also for every company, because it is the direct
contact with the demand, with reality. Nothing is more important than contact with reality. Yes, there are definitely exceptions,
especially what we see in finance, insurance, or
really mass-market products. There really are people here
making data-driven decisions, etc. But most mid-sized and large
companies are still waking up. But at least they're in wake-up mode. Where SEO can help tighten budgets is:. SEO shows where there is demand based on
search terms, search volume, click price, what people specifically want, based on
search results, search refinements, etc. And which content investments or SEO investments
will pay off if you make them.
You will learn which content formats work, what the target group wants to see and what
this content must look like. And you can
work incredibly purposefully in complex situations. Depending on, say, your customers
or your target group changes, etc., you can start at different
phases of the customer journey. So as an example: We are now seeing this
shift to larger customers. For the little ones,
implementation, implementation, implementation is important. For the older ones, advice is much more important. Accordingly, we
then simply build landing pages on the subject of advice and position ourselves here.
And this is how SEO can help other businesses too. So. SEO is simply user centricity and
user centricity always leads to efficiency. You can produce less and less content. You don't have a blog where you
have someone who produces countless blog articles here, but you can produce less content
and achieve more because you know the content makes sense,
this content doesn't make sense. What is the purpose of this content? And if it doesn't serve a purpose, I don't do it. Then I invest the hours in something else. You can make SEO campaigns cheaper through better landing page experiences and
thus a better quality score. So for everyone who doesn't know how the
Quality Score is made up in Google Ads.
Quite a simple graphic, which
is of course simplified: It's about the expected click rate, how
relevant the ad itself is, but it's also about where do users end up
and how relevant is that to the whole concept? And accordingly
I can lower the click prices. Then, I can react to new
developments in a tailor-made way. When I see, "Oh, here comes a new trend!" Then, if this trend
is relevant to the company and pursues any corporate goals, I build appropriate content here
and can get the first-mover advantage by being the first to publish on the subject of content,
and that is very often a huge advantage in terms of ranking.
And after thousands of years you can finally
let go of esotericism, gut feeling, hearsay and you can easily orientate yourself to demand data and
not this data mishmash that you often have in companies, but simply beautifully
prepared and based on demand. Because Google will always
reflect demand to you because that's what they do – or other
search engines you prefer doesn't matter. Sun. Number 3: SEO builds trust and
credibility in uncertain times. Organic search – and
you can twist and turn it however you want – is the gateway to the Internet. I believe over 65% of starting points in an online experience
start with a search on a search engine. And, as we've already discussed, by far the most clicks
in search engines go to organic results
and not to advertising.
Maybe, so SEA is great, but
maybe you should reconsider how the distribution between SEA and SEO is. It currently feels like ten times more SEA than SEO. Of course, if you know the facts and figures
, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Then, the top results
enjoy the highest confidence. For one thing, they're not ads and
they like to be seen as the best. That means it's not advertising, someone must have earned it.
And how do you earn something? By having the best product. Which,
of course, is [ __ ], because at the end of the day, if someone does good SEO, they do
n't necessarily have to have the best product.
And if you then also use Google's
Quality Rate Guidelines for your own content team, for example, especially
the E-E-A-T concept, you have a clear, simple set of rules for content marketing that builds trust, establishes authority and your
own company positioned as an expert. That means you don't have to
come up with a content marketing strategy, there is a super simple set of rules
from Google that you can follow. And what you obviously want to achieve through SEO – in
combination, as I said, I'm not saying "just SEO", I'm just saying SEO is easy now – SEO
is generally the most grandiose channel, but SEO is the most grandiose channel especially now in this
situation . What you want to build in combination with
your other marketing channels is a functioning ecosystem because it systematizes
trust building… I say that all the time, content marketing ecosystem
is my favorite word. Because what you do is you build an ecosystem
that you use to build targeted entry points where, without doing anything further, you generate helpful contact points with your
target audience.
And the accumulation of these helpful touchpoints
builds trust and credibility. In the end, in many industries – and
our customers say this most often: In many industries you no
longer have to compete on price. Because you have to compete on price if
you desperately run any ads. But if you are the one who
has built trust through good advice – easy peasy, everything super easy. This means that SEO can – which I don't even have in my notes right now –
help you extremely with your conversion rate. So. And then number 4, but I
already announced it:. The compound effect of SEO. We have our worldwide gear change,
which I don't want to repeat again, but of course SEO fits perfectly into this situation
because, from my point of view, it's the only online marketing channel with
a real compound effect where it does is: I build something, so I keep doing things over time and then I get
this crazy exponential growth.
So, just to show a few examples here: These are all classic SEO curves. It's not that exponential now, but
you can see that you're building something up and even if you're having really hard times and you have to
reduce your budget, I don't forget it. Because, let's say, we're having really
difficult, difficult times, then everyone has to reduce their budgets and if everyone reduces,
since everything in SEO revolves around the comparison to the competition – if everyone reduces, if
you do less, you hold your visibility. And, of course, demand may decrease.
But still, you keep your visibility and you don't lose it versus
using other channels, so you pour in, you get out –
if you turn it off or reduce it, you'll get
less out at exactly the same rate. And that is the ultimate argument. So. And what is simply the most important thing to me
and I think that very few companies have realized is: This compound effect can have an
extremely positive impact on many corporate areas , because you don't buy
visibility, you build visibility.
So it's all about what does the user want? You always have user centricity,
user centricity, user centricity. On the one hand, this means that
almost every department can benefit from this SEO data. You can use it to
develop, improve existing content strategies
and other digital strategies. And if you are really crazy now and
you have really integrated SEO into your corporate DNA, then this
data can also be used for product development and for corporate management in general
.
Because you see… Well, we have a customer,
for example in the credit sector: With SEO, you see developments so early on
that others only see much later, because of course they don't have this real-time data
of "Oh my God, this is happening right now." And yes, SEO shows demand. And what is more important for a company
than demand. And what I may not have
mentioned about the compound effect: What you have of course is:
Over time your click price decreases, your price per lead, your cost per sale, your
cost per acquisition, whatever you call it – everything goes down over time of
course, to a certain extent of course.
At some point, if you dominate everything,
then of course the return on investment from SEO will be lower, logically, then
it's about maintaining this situation. But very few companies
get into this situation quickly, and when you're in this situation,
you know the value of SEO anyway. Fits. And that's what comes from CMOs
who are inquiring right now and what arguments they bring and my theories as to
why this shift is suddenly taking place. The small ones, yes I think there have been
many companies for which things have always been tight and now
it's getting too tight. And if you do SEO right, you can definitely use SEO to
do more with less budget. And I think that's
the most important thing in this situation. And that's the end of it. A completely different format, more about
current economic developments. I hope you enjoyed this episode too. And otherwise, thanks for
watching and see you next time. Bye!.
