Do SEO Agencies Produce Business Results?

Spoiler alert: SEO Agencies aren't worth it

This will rile up quite a few “SEO experts,” but the fact is search engine optimization isn’t rocket science. In fact, it’s getting easier every day. It’s not quite at the point of “Create Content, Receive Traffic,” but if you know the basics of keyword strategy and article titling it might as well be. If you're looking for actual value and business results, SEO agencies provide only half the package.

When it comes down to it, SEO agencies are going to focus on three things:

• Keyword density
• META data
• Inbound links

And that’s about it. I’m generalizing quite a bit, but that’s because a lot of SEO agencies you find on the Internet are concerned with charging as much as possible and providing—or faking—the minimum amount of results, often through blackhat (read: spam) techniques. Optimizing your site only goes so far, and even the most unsavvy webmaster can figure out how to do that in an afternoon. Mostly, though, it comes down to this:

SEO Agencies won't tell you traffic is not revenue

It just isn’t. The story is a bit different if you make your living selling ad space, but for any other B2C or B2B business, traffic does not equal revenue. But it can, with the correct tools focusing on business results. Leads and conversions equal revenue, which is why you’re better off going with a marketing agency like Mojo Media Labs that focuses on marketing return on investment, business results, and maximizing conversion rates. Achieving business results is all about math:

Say we need to generate $100,000 in revenue from our website, and each customer has an average value of $100. If 1 out of every 100 visitors becomes a customer, we’re going to need about 100,000 visitors. Easy math, right? Now, let’s say we add a call to action to the front page that leads to a landing page offering a now service guide ebook (the sort of thing Mojo likes to do) and that bumps the customer conversion rate just one point, to 2%. (And that’s 2% minimum—I’d venture it would go at 3-4%.) Suddenly, you don’t need 100,000 visitors, you need only 50,000, which is much more manageable and easy to achieve. Or, say your online marketing agency creates a wealth of content for you and rocks your social media (Again: Mojo!) so that you hit those 100,000 visitors anyway. You’ve just doubled your revenue and pulled in $200,000 for the year. How about those business results? Let's see SEO agencies to do that.

You can scale these numbers up and down however you like, because the system works. It’s why Mojo is able to give awesome business results. We aren’t focused on just SEO, or just social media, we’re focused on the complete package—and we’ve seen SEO agencies and other competitors who offer only one service or another charge just as much as we do. It blows our minds. That’s why we’re leading the marketing revolution.

What’s better for business results is that content marketing agencies double as SEO agencies without even trying. As long as we’re creating a steady stream of content—blogs, ebooks, social media content, etc—and optimizing it correctly with the proper keywords (which we do), you’re going to get found in search engines and see business results. That’s the way the machine works. And we can track visitors from point of origin--broken down from social media to blog to email, down to individual link all the way to conversion points to dollar worth of customer. We can get that data and use it to optimize conversions in ways SEO agencies can't. Better yet, you’re going to attract those high-quality inbound links you could never get with SEO agencies using a spambot, because other blogs will want to link to your content. It will be organic, and a single high-quality organic link is worth much more to search engines than a ton of spammy blog comments.

So you decide: SEO agencies or online marketing agencies for achieving business results? The first are on their way out—the potential of online marketing is just getting started.