Does search engine optimization (SEO) work for all businesses? To some degree yes, but many businesses would be better off to spend their limited marketing resources another way.
A good SEO marketer should be able to spend a couple of hours on preliminary research to determine how competitive the industry/keywords are and how costly is will be to effectively market your business with SEO. By looking at the amount of search being done and the number of competitors in your marketplace, a good supplier of SEO services should be able to advise how much time and effort (read expense) will be required and whether you can achieve the goals you have shared with them.
Generally, real estate brokers will not get a good ROI on an investment in SEO marketing because there are thousands of brokers competing for those searches in any given geographic area. The exception to this circumstance will be if the broker specializes in an area not many other brokers are focused on such as “selling heritage properties” where content is very targeted and not highly competitive.
This observation does not follow for other services. Dental businesses, for example, that we provide digital marketing services are usually targeting a finite area surrounding their practice because studies show people are only willing to drive so far for these services.
We advise our dentist clients that SEO can work for them by providing confidence building reviews, communicating their specific services to new people who have moved into the area and by allowing dentists to showcase their knowledge and expertise with an inbound marketing approach.
We also suggest that other marketing should be employed such as mining of existing clients for referrals and additional services through networking groups, direct mail and direct calling, using in-office marketing as well as social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram) to share and extend the SEO content that gets created.
Contact me if you want to know if SEO or PPC marketing can help your business.
Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consulting in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years experience in building and implementing marketing plans for small business.