Small Bytes: Influencer Marketing VS SEO

In this episode, we discuss the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in brand building. 

And, although SEO can be confusing and expensive, it offers long-term benefits that outshine short-term marketing strategies like influencer marketing, which can be unpredictable and less controllable. 

SEO should be a key component of any brand's website/marketing strategy and recommends integrating it with brand building to foster trust among consumers and eventually increase sales. 

I have Remy Audette, from Sunday Best lined up to go into more detail on mixing brand strategy and SEO together to help grow your business.

00:00 Introduction and Rekindling Love for Website

00:48 Introduction to the Level Up Podcast

01:20 Understanding SEO and Its Importance

03:09 The Role of Luck in SEO Success

04:08 The Value of SEO vs Influencer Marketing

05:21 The Risks of Relying on Social Media Platforms

06:07 Integrating SEO into Your Brand Strategy

06:48 Building Trust and Confidence through SEO

Transcript

[00:00:00] 
Welcome back. Just before the holiday break, I rekindled my love. with my website, which if most of you, most of you in the creative spaces will know, this is one of the things that gets completely pushed to into the background. I was speaking to another designer friend the other day who had just rekindled her love and was going to.

[00:00:31] 
Yeah, relaunched her website, full new design, and more projects on there. Just putting a little bit more love into it.

[00:00:48] 
This is the Level Up podcast. I'm your host, Martin Sully, a brand strategist, designer and founder of Snapper Studio. And I'm on a mission to help you gain clarity and confidence in your brand. I'll arm you with bite-sized tips. and introduce you to friends of the show who are taking their brand to the next level.

[00:01:20] 
Being the sole person that works in the business, I decided to update some old blogs with fresh content, and new thinking, and in particular just invest some time into improving the SEO. And so for you guys that might not be in a position where you're familiar with it or don't need to know what it is, that's, that's okay.

[00:01:50] 
So SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's a big, big industry. And I've got a couple of people lined up, they're going to kind of come in and, and go through the specifics. It's an industry that can be misleading, people can take advantage of people because it's a, it's a bit of a mysterious entity.

[00:02:19] 
So people naturally, you know, they just take advantage of it. So anyway, we are not here to bust what SEO is and kind of open it up. But, yeah, somehow. During the work that I did, I managed to rank myself in the top 10 for a few phrases that people looked for. Which, heh, is interesting because before I even sort of started investigating it, I didn't realize just how much work goes into it.

[00:02:57] 
There's no quick way to do it, there's a lot of guessing there's a lot of hopeful content writing. And look, I am definitely no expert. I actually think that me achieving, a good rank in a couple of those keyword phrases that I wanted to rank in was probably 90 percent luck. 

So anyway yeah, I was asked in a group brand strategy workshop, whether SEO was worth looking at because, and there's going to be a few people, especially the SEO guys that are listening and just marketing people and any sort of business owner in, in general that has put money into SEO. If they put money into it, they know that long term you'll get good value for money.

[00:04:00] 
Generally speaking, if you've invested in the right people to help you

[00:04:08] 
Anyway, so they had this person, a business coach reach out to them and told them to focus on putting their money into getting influencers. I'm not an expert, like I said, but I understand that the long-term benefits of having an SEO strategy far outweighs a little short-term gain that you may have.

[00:04:38] 
And like, there's no, with influencer marketing, there's no guarantee that it leads to additional traffic or even extra sales. And like you've when that's all good. Like, even if you get all the traffic in the world, if you've got a crappy website that doesn't work, you will still not make the sales that you need.

[00:05:04] 
So you will just be spending money. The other thing is, that you've got very little opportunity to control what the influencers say about your brand. Yes, you can probably, you can probably give them some guidelines. But you've got no control of how it looks and with the back, the backside of this is, it's also, and this has been well documented, like social media is not a platform you can own.

[00:05:34] 
So really if, you know, if, you know, there was the incident a few years back where Facebook just stopped letting news articles, you know, they closed down lots of, you know, or put holds on lots of news channels because they didn't want any information being displayed. They felt it was detracting from their opportunities to advertise and they just chopped it off overnight, like bang, that's it, it's gone.

[00:06:03] 
So I just want to say that if you can. Integrate SEO into your brand strategy. And there's a couple of really cool people that talk a lot about this. So Remy Odette or across LinkedIn and a little bit, she runs an agency called Sunday Best, and she talks all about how to integrate your brand strategy with SEO to become like a really part important part of building the trust that you need to kind of build up and I've had conversations with her and she's Probably at some point going to jump on the podcast.

[00:06:41] 
It's going to be great to get her input on this topic. And then, yeah, in turn, when you're building that brand and doing it well through, through a mix, the mix of SEO and the content that you produce in turn, people. You know, it can help people feel confident enough to purchase something or to book your service, which should be the ultimate goal.