This is a recurring issue we keep on coming across with small- to medium-sized businesses that want to take on the 2000-lb gorilla in their industry or marketplace. The challenge is getting a young and successful company that has hit a plateau to perform better to continue to grow and take market share away from larger corporations.
A part of that paradigm shift is how the company’s website performs for relevant or related products or services. It wasn’t making any progress in terms of organic search results. Yes, SEO is an important part of marketing, but let’s keep in mind that it is just one of many moving parts in your marketing mix that must be planned for, organized, choreographed, and monitored.
Getting back to this issue we keep seeing, the nascent company wasn’t eating up any extra market share online. We’re talking about how many sets of eyeballs were seeing the company’s website when a potential customer was doing a qualified search for their service offering. Even after some basic search optimization of their tags and content (content was fair, not great), they were not able to get in front of more sets of eyeballs.
We did our research and knew what we had to do… build much more content on the website including more pages about service details, new services, news updates, editorials, promotions, etc. We informed the client of this need and made a plan, but we made the mistake of not explaining in objective metrics why this needed to happen. With a contract in-hand, we had assumed the client trusted us and understood our urgency. After a few months of only small progress due to the client’s distraction in other aspects of the business, we tried to emphasize the need to create content which relied on final touches and approval of leadership. It just wasn’t happening.
If every webpage is an opportunity to reel in new clients or customers, wouldn’t you want to create as many pages as possible?
– We tried this metaphor
Another 2 months go by and we’re still supporting their SEO plus google ads, social media and other aspects of their Internet marketing. But they still were not producing or allowing us to produce more content. Meanwhile, they raised concerns about the minor progress with SEO.
How in the heck do you expect to make up any ground on the competition with websites that have 200, 400, and 600 pages when we’re building 1, sometimes 2, pages per month onto the mere 50 we have?
-We were a bit frustrated
“Oh geez, I didn’t realize that.”
Despite our attempts to lead the client to water and emphasize the need to build out lading pages, more detail, industry news, or even just company updates (blog), we hadn’t expressed in undeniable numbers the chasm that needed to be traversed in terms of creating content.
Apparently the fishing metaphor didn’t ring true in the client’s ears. Maybe they just don’t fish or haven’t fished. Who knows? Nonetheless, we still like the metaphor and think it is great in conveying the idea.