The role of SEO or organic search within an integrated marketing strategy is pivotal and ensures a campaign can continue to deliver ROI long after that first investment.
Our Head of SEO looks at how their team plays a crucial part in our integrated campaigns and delivering effective, long-term results working alongside our other channels.
At the heart of digital marketing lies this collaboration and interdepartmental liaison. It is something we believe to be crucial in any agency, but especially those delivering integrated strategies. Whilst most appreciate that this is fundamental, getting it right can be a challenge with so many departments and stakeholders at play.
Here’s how we like to think SEO helps to bind this all together and ensure that the wider campaigns gain the benefit of our activity:
Technical SEO recommendations
Technical SEO recommendations, by nature, are designed to improve overall website health, which often has a positive knock-on effect on other teams and their activity.
Although these suggestions for optimisation are intended to improve crawlability, indexing, and other such SEO related disciplines, they are often best practice for website performance in general.
SEO suggestions come in all shapes and sizes and will depend greatly on the type of site, its audience and the KPI’s of the campaign, but we tend to find that these recommendations overlap with our other technical channels and allow for easy collaboration.
Site speed and performance
With a large proportion of the SEO industry currently clamouring to appease Google and its Page Experience Update through the obsessive improvement of Core Web Vitals scores, rightly or wrongly, this inevitably leads to improvements in user experience and therefore conversion.
Aside from the impact on usability and online sales, enhancing the speed of a website can provide a welcome boost to landing page experience – a core aspect of Google Ads’ quality score.
This also complements Google’s mobile speed page score, meaning that any improvements made to site speed because of SEO recommendations are highly likely to improve paid search performance. This again contributes to the overall ROI a client is likely to get from their integrated strategy.
Web migrations
If there’s one thing that any integrated digital marketing strategy depends upon, it is a first-class website. From structure and information architecture to lightning loading time and a pragmatically thought-out conversion funnel; these things are essential if you’re going to be driving more and more traffic to a domain.
Whilst all channels will be advocates for the need of a stellar website, it will often be the SEO team that makes the strongest case for a migration to a newly designed, restructured or even re-platformed website from a performance perspective.
Business cases, forecasting, and SEO impact will usually form the basis for any such rationale. In turn, this helps clients to acquire sufficient sign-off and budgets for the required updates and migration work.
Migrations are a truly integrated process, involving the expertise of project management, designers, developers, UX and CRO experts alike, but also a superb opportunity for us SEOs to bake-in all of our technical recommendation into the build of a shiny new, high converting website.
SEO and developer liaison is key here and something we take great pride in at TrunkBBI.
Tools and competitor analysis
We listen to our clients’ feedback and one thing that nearly all our valued customers have in common, is wanting to know exactly what their competition is up to.
Although we don’t like to rely too much on tools over good old fashioned SEO auditing, we do have a few in our arsenal that allow us to provide some great daily insight into how brands are performing in search.
SEO visibility, backlinks, indexed pages and brand mentions are just some of the things we share across the business to help get an edge over competitors and make informed campaign decisions.
It doesn’t stop there; the SEO team also regularly provides other teams with valuable information from our tools and audits ranging from site crawls and URL lists to SSL certificate information and information on accessibility.
Reporting
Finally, SEO can also be crucial to integrated reporting solutions. Our SEO team are pretty obsessive about Google Data Studio and the connectors and collaboration it facilitates in terms of reporting dashboards and benchmarking.
Whilst Data Studio is certainly not just for SEOs and allows a range of data sources to be plugged in, it can often fall to performance teams such as organic and paid search to show the impact of an integrated campaign and how all channels combine to deliver all round excellence
How to make SEO work harder for your brand
Getting to grips with your SEO activity can be challenging if you don’t have the in-house resource or expertise that comes with a multichannel team. We’ve been helping global brands to not only achieve their goals with SEO, but to make it work harder across integrated campaigns that give a better ROI.
Take a look at some of our case studies to find out more about some of the great work we have been delivering for our clients, or book a consultation with one of our experts to learn how we can elevate your brand.