Four Ways Your SEO Team is Sucking the Life out of Your Marketing Budget

In case you missed the breaking news a few blogs back, we’re in a recession. That means that, even if you’re heeding our advice and maintaining your marketing budget, you need those dollars to count more than ever.

Investing in organic traffic isn’t as sexy as the immediate returns from performance channels, but the sustained growth over time is lucrative for those with the patience to pursue it. But most SEO teams are leaving sales (read: your ROI) on the table by making one or several of these mistakes:

Focusing on the wrong KPIs. This is common for less seasoned SEO teams as they focus on arbitrary metrics like page speed and SEMRush scores rather than the ultimate bottom line: sales or leads from organic traffic.

Only working to improve on-page SEO. On-page, or on-site SEO, is only half of the game. Great content on a fast site with a strong architecture means nothing if you’re relying on a Field of Dreams “build it and they’ll come” mentality. Despite what you might have heard on Twitter, it’s been proven that quality backlinks matter and can make or break an SEO strategy at the end of the day.

Failing to integrate SEO with other channels. The insights from paid channels coupled with the compounding effects of collaboration with your PR team can take your brand’s Omni channel Flywheel- and your margins- to the next level.

Only focusing on Google. According to Mashable, 40% of Gen Z is using Instagram or TikTok as a search engine. From where we sit, it looks like it’s only a matter of time before Google begins to index TikTok into its organic results. Plus, our old friend Bing (remember them?) still accounts for 7% of all search traffic. While it’s safe to say that Google isn’t going anywhere, marketing leaders would be wise to take advantage of the low-hanging fruit on Bing and hedge their bets by doubling down on great TikTok and Instagram content.