Why SEO is overrated if you need clients for your professional service
Almost all marketing agencies tell you the very same tactic:
Get your website search engine optimized
Create ads that direct people to your website
Continue & further optimize the process until you succeed
Well, this tactic works for many businesses for sure; it can even be counterproductive and slow your growth. It also locks you in with your agency's binding contracts, constantly evaluating & optimizing your SEO, which doesn't deliver valuable clients.
Why is SEO overrated?
There is a big difference between finding a service provider and trusting in one.
While SEO can help with the finding, it certainly hurts the trust as most customers looking for service providers on Google are price-shopping. If you provide a valuable service to your customers, you certainly don't want to offer said services cheaply. Sure, SEO can give you a quick boost in clients - but are these clients you want to stick with for the long-term? SEO is not the best option for you if you are thinking about a customer's lifetime value.
The second problem with SEO is that everyone is doing it - the competition for rankings is insanely high. Imagine that you are a law firm in a particular area - there are many-many law firms around you as competitors. Everyone is doing some form of SEO nowadays. Investing in SEO is like buying a billboard ad next to the highway, surrounded by 100 other billboards bought up by your competitors.
Switch away from short-term results to long-term investment
The key to massive growth is pretty simple. You have to establish credibility within your field of expertise. Then you have to market that credibility with a combination of well-designed content (which is SEO-friendly), hyper-targeted online ads, and a marketing machine that converts visitors to leads for you & your team. It is that simple; however, not many businesses are doing it.
Why? Because it is a long-term strategy - and everyone is thinking short-term when it comes to marketing.
But why would you think short-term in selling your professional services if you have obtained those services with hard work, long-term planning, and dedication?
A long-term investment produces results that overpower short-term ones - but it takes time to make it fruitful.
Becoming a thought leader in your field
While SEO might get you some short-term results, establishing a thought leadership platform will deliver you clients all the time. Once the platform is set & established, you only need to maintain it. But what are the main tactics, how would you do it?
It all starts with content. Before creating content, you have to figure out what type of content works for you. Not everyone is comfortable with video, for example - and you have to be comfortable with the content you produce, as you will create it for the long-term. Also, not every type of content suits your business and its goals. A content strategy helps you figure out what kind of content you need to produce and how you should create it.
We always recommend blogging or any written content first. You can repurpose written content into downloadable lead-magnet materials, such as ebooks. Written content also helps you with SEO indirectly - the more valuable content you produce, the higher your impact on Google. Also, written content can quickly establish credibility as it is a useful content piece for your prospects.
The next step should be something that builds your personal brand. Many B2B service providers such as lawyers find massive success on social media such as LinkedIn.
Sharing personalized professional content boosts your credibility while builds your personal brand as well.
We recommend starting a multimedia channel, one that you are comfortable with - a YouTube show or a podcast.
The magic happens when you combine the content you produce together - you do a podcast episode, which you turn into a blog from the podcast's transcript, then share it on social media with your peers.
The combined effort of repurposed content boosted with pay-per-click ads delivers an insane result for you - even in the short-term.
You have to make sure that there is a marketing machine at the end of your funnel that captures the visitors' attention and turns them into leads for your team.
