When you’re growing your brand, many marketeers might tell you that you can simply boost your content online with search and social media ads to reach your audience. Social media ads were an easy win when I started out in marketing in 2009, but those days are over.
The ability to finely target your audience based on very detailed criteria used to be a goldmine. As long as you had at least a modest budget, you could purchase real engagement and leads with social media and search ads. So, what happened?
Privacy concerns for digital consumers
As we evolve as a society online, we’ve started paying more attention to our privacy. New regulations give digital consumers more control over what data companies can passively collect information about you with cookies, as well as what data is allowed to be used for personalized ads on social media.
I was working in corporate marketing at the height of the scramble in Europe to comply with new GDPR restrictions. Suddenly, strategies that had worked for a decade no longer cut it. If you no longer have the data about your potential customers to fine tune your ads, they aren’t as relevant or effective.
Of course, many social media platforms have found ways around this by now, but the old days of driving tons of revenue through paid ads online are over for those of us who don’t have very deep pockets. The budgets I managed during my time in corporate marketing were astronomical compared to what the average person can afford. Having tested lots of small budget ad campaigns throughout the years, I can tell you that their effectiveness has been drastically reduced.
I say all of this to say: if you’re launching a new business with limited financial resources, do not dump your money into paid social media ads. Search ads can perform with a lot of fine tuning on a small budget, but I still say why buy traffic when great SEO gives you quality traffic for free?
What SEO strategies will work for my business in 2025?
As someone who’s been in the industry a long time, I can tell you that there have been lots of temporary trends in SEO – loopholes that people found to artificially boost their search results rankings – but what always works in SEO is what has been said about it from the very beginning – high-quality, relevant content.
People who are using search engines are looking to solve a problem or answer a question, almost every single time. The best way to have great SEO on your website is to provide clear and relevant answers to these problems and questions. It doesn’t have to get more complex than that, as long as you can back up your assumptions about how your customers are searching with data.
Start by creating relevant and useful content targeted towards your ideal customer, and use any SEO research you’ve done to infuse relevant terms into your content in a natural way. You can always update your content and test to see which terms work best within your niche. SEO evolves over time, so it’s important to track the terms you’re using and update your content periodically.
You’ll also want to brush up on the technical aspects of SEO to make sure you’ve tagged everything properly on your website. I always recommend that SEO beginners connect their website to Google Search Console. This will allow you to track the performance of your search term over time, as well as alert you to any potential technical issues that are preventing your website from appearing or ranking in search results.
How do I track my SEO performance over time?
There are a lot of free and paid tools that will help you track your website’s SEO performance to make long-term improvements and achieve a steady flow of organic traffic. I recommend focusing on quality metrics, like click-through rate, time on site, and bounce rate when looking at your website’s organic traffic.
Each of these metrics can tell you important information about how well you are doing to provide your potential customers with the solutions they are looking for. The process of trying and testing, reiterating and testing again is how you build great organic traffic over time. SEO is a long-term investment, and with a little time and consistency, you can drive a sustainable amount of organic search traffic to your website.
If you’re looking to level up your SEO strategy and you’re not sure where to start, you can download my free SEO guide. We can also hop on a free consultation call to discuss the pain points you’re experiencing. SEO can seem complex, but it shouldn’t be a barrier to your brand’s performance online. Let AS Consulting fill in the gaps in your marketing strategy.