If you’ve been planning a hardcore, full-time SEO effort, here are a few things you should keep in mind.

While SEO may seem like the ideal solution to your inbound marketing problems, but given the extreme competition out there, it won’t accomplish a lot without,

• Good writing
• Consistent content creation
• An engaging brand
• Creative design
• A damn good product

If you don’t have all of these critical components backing you up, your SEO efforts are going to pan out at some point and you’ll find yourself on a plateau that stretches right to the horizon.

However, if you’ve got a halfway decent marketing team that can deliver the aforementioned positives, here’s a peek at what SEO can do for you (and what it can’t).

Visibility

One of the key objectives of SEO is to get your website ranked higher among search engine results pages (SERPS) for specific keywords (that’s why it’s called Search Engine Optimization).

And most people seem to believe that the website in pole position on a SERP must be relevant because, much like the Titanic, Google is too big and efficient to be fallible. Not true, but hey – It gives your branding a real boost, so we’d rather not complain.

Traffic

Well, if you sell custom-made motorcycles, SEO can optimize your search rankings for key phrases like ‘custom motorcycles’, ‘custom crafted choppers’ and the like. By using a mix of broad and specific local search terms, starting with the latter (e.g. custom motorcycles detroit) and then moving on to more widely defined searches, a dedicated SEO team can slap your URLs all over the first ten search results that Google throws up.

Of course there’s a lot more to it than just keyword research. SEO teams will engage in link-building, social bookmarking, blog commentary, content marketing and a host of other techniques to ensure that your site has an astronomical number of inbound links.

What is the point of this, you ask?

Search drives focused traffic. That much is obvious.

In-bound links tell the Google crawler that you’re popular and popularity equals high search rankings.

What is also a fairly common realization is that few people move past the first SERP. That is why you need your site ranked among the first 10 results if you intend to drive a lot of traffic. Capiche?

Conversions

Traffic means nothing without a steady conversion rate. The idea is to garner ‘relevant traffic’! This means people who are in the market for your product or service. SEO can accomplish this by optimizing your website towards highly targeted keywords and by increasing the overall traffic to your site.

Conversion optimization, however, depends on a great many factors that lie outside the ambit of simple SEO, including writing and design skills.

On the flipside, the long tail approach to SEO is especially useful since most of the keywords involved are narrow searches that drive highly focused traffic to your landing pages. Although long tail traffic may not amount to much, you’re likely to see significantly higher conversion rates when compared to broader search hits.

Setting Goals

So, what have we learnt? Well, for one thing your SEO objectives need to be clearly defined because SEO works differently for different business models. Here’s a list of conceivable goals to set your SEO team,

• Attract a certain amount of traffic to your site.
• To change/improve public perception of your brand/cause.
• Generate qualified sales leads
• Improve your social media visibility

Each one of these goals will offer varying levels of profitability depending on your business model. For example, content farms stand to gain much from raw traffic generation, primarily because they extract most of their revenue from PPC advertising. Similarly, while almost all businesses can benefit from lead generation, e-commerce sites will probably make the most out of the high conversion rate that qualified leads offer.

But remember, all of these ‘goals’ are intertwined and most often you’ll find that a combination of all of the above is likely to work best for you.

However, you may need to place a disparate proportion of emphasis on each specific goal. That is why you need to identify exactly what your business needs are and prioritize your SEO efforts to maximize your ROI.