Is Marketing Analytics More Important Than SEO For Driving Sales?

Is marketing analytics more important than search engine optimization for driving business results? The answer may depend on your company, but there are some very good reasons why marketing analytics should take priority.

The truth is that the truth is seldom simple or cut-and-dry when it comes to SEO vs marketing analytics. It really depends on your company’s needs, industry and current online marketing strategy. Marketing Analytics Marketers make decisions based on their understanding of how customers interact with their brand online in order to drive sales. Marketing analytics helps identify these customer interactions so marketers can create a plan for increasing sales. Here are just some questions that would require answers from marketing analytics: What products are selling? Where are the opportunities for upselling? Where do customers enter the buying cycle? Where are our best opportunities to cross-sell? Which remarketing placements are most effective for driving conversions?

SEO vs Marketing Analytics

Where marketing analytics excels is in helping marketers understand what’s working and what isn’t. It can identify whether you’re targeting the right audience, how they’re entering the sales funnel, where they’re dropping off along the way, and which channels drive traffic that converts. All of this data comes together into a cohesive strategy by identifying specific goals and ways to reach them. The primary goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to help you rank higher on search engines so customers looking for your product or service will find you. You want people searching for your services to find your website first. SEO can be an extremely valuable channel for driving traffic, but you need to understand how it works.

Search engine ranking is based on search engines’ understanding of keywords and their relationships to content. The more quality content you have with the right keywords, the higher your site will rank. What’s great about this approach is that people should be searching for what you’re offering anyway! That means they’re already looking for your product or service, which makes them a much more qualified lead than generic traffic from social media or other sources where consumers are not actively looking for what you offer at that time. Does SEO work? Absolutely! According to Moz, 69% of marketers believe organic search drives “very high” or “high” levels of lead generation, and Hubspot reports that about 64% of marketers actively invest time in search engine optimization. However, there are some disadvantages you need to consider.

Marketing Analytics vs SEO: Advantages and Disadvantages

It’s Often Slow To Show Results

If your goal is increased visibility at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), then it’s going to take time to see results from organic search. Search engine rankings change based on algorithms that can fluctuate without warning–in other words, all too often! It’s not uncommon for sites to experience major swings in their SERPs overnight based on recent changes made by search engines. This means you could go to sleep one night with solid search positioning and wake up the next morning in a completely different place. It can take several months to build up your website’s organic traffic, and then just as quickly as you moved up, your position could drop again. It’s not worth planning marketing campaigns around something that can change at any moment!

2. SEO Is Difficult For Your Competitors To Figure Out

If you’re successful with SEO, it means everyone else who wants to do the same thing will be looking for the same keywords and content strategies you are. They will also make attempts to disrupt your rankings when they find ways for their websites to outrank yours–regardless of whether or not they even offer a better product or service than you do. The only thing that really changes in this case is who gets to the top spot on SERPs–not necessarily who has a better website or product offering. This is why it’s important to stay competitive and continue optimizing your website with current SEO practices, but marketing analytics can help you know when to shift tactics and strategies to gain an advantage over the competition.

Marketing Analytics vs SEO: Conclusion

Marketing analytics exists for one purpose: to help marketers uncover what they need to know about their customers and sales processes so they can drive sales and be more effective in every aspect of their marketing efforts. The truth is, search engine optimization (SEO) comes at a cost where marketing analytics does not; marketing analytics can actually help reduce your costs at the same time as it increases your marketing ROI. SEO is one of many tools for driving traffic to your website–not the only strategy you should be focusing on. If you want more leads and sales, invest in marketing analytics software that helps you track, extract, and act on real-time data so you can unleash the full power of every channel at your disposal.