Create sales through Google

You’ve come to the realization that you want to sell with the help of Google. It’s a smart, long-term, and financially sound choice. However, there are still a number of questions you need to answer in order to move forward in the right way.

Marketing and sales in search engines is smart. The question is just how you should approach it. Let’s go through some of the common questions and pitfalls that exist along the way to a successful investment in the search results.

Advertise or optimize?

One of the most common questions I get is whether you should put your budget into search engine optimization or search engine advertising. Is SEO or Google Ads the answer?

My firm opinion is that you should do both. They serve different purposes, and both can deliver direct returns — meaning the channel can generate sales in a way that pays for itself. If you spend 1000 SEK a day on Google Ads and know you’re getting your money back with some profit after all expenses, there’s no reason to stop — in fact, every reason to increase until you can’t anymore. SEO, on the other hand, tends to deliver huge value for a relatively small investment, though it usually takes a bit longer. It’s not unusual to get ten times your money back on SEO, or even much more.

My web agency says SEO is included in the site

Depending on how you look at it, this is probably true. An important part of SEO is a technically well-built site. However, that’s not the whole job — just like having a logo doesn’t mean you’re a marketing expert. Having a logo is good, but by itself it won’t generate sales. SEO goes far beyond a technically solid site. One aspect, for example, is deciding which keywords belong on which pages, another is building site authority. Will your agency deliver on that?

Which department is responsible for search engine marketing?

If you’re fortunate enough to work at a company that’s big enough for it to be unclear who owns the responsibility, some tricky situations can arise. Advertising usually ends up in the right place — either marketing or sales owns it. SEO can be more difficult, and often it falls on some form of development/IT, perhaps together with marketing. While it’s true that you’ll often need some development work along the way, my personal view is that the project shouldn’t be owned there. SEO should be owned by the person responsible for increasing sales or growth. That might mean the responsibility needs to climb fairly high up in the hierarchy, but those are usually the cases where the results turn out best.

When should I start with SEO?

With very few exceptions, the answer is: immediately. It doesn’t matter if you’re building a new site in seven months or planning a big video campaign tomorrow. You want your SEO in place as soon as possible. Partly because it’s a slow process, partly because you want to fully leverage SEO in all your other marketing efforts. This is especially true if you’re building a new site — the best option is to include SEO already in the planning stage, rather than trying to add it afterwards. Of course, that can also be fixed later, but then you’ll be correcting things that weren’t optimal instead of building a site ready to win in the search results from the start.