How SEO Can Help More Than Just Your Sales Department?
The largest selling point or benefit of SEO services is that it helps bring high traffic levels to the sales funnel and ultimately produces new customers – keeping the sales department very happy.
But this is not where it stops. There are many other benefits of SEO services that can be felt in various other departments for your organization.
SEO Helps Customer Service Departments Keep Customers Happy
Your website is a 24/7 customer service department. But what good is your online service department if your customer’s can’t find it?
Search engine optimization helps to increase the visibility of your customer service as well as create informative content that is valuable and helpful to your customers.
Popular SEO strategies that can improve your customer care is writing FAQ pages, self help guidelines as well as stating policies and providing contact information. If you have a website that sells products, SEO will also help in optimizing all your product lines using pictures and detailed descriptions that often answers all of your questions your search traffic might ask.
SEO Helps Marketing Departments Create Sustainable Pull Strategy
You could argue that marketing and sales are the same department – but consider some of the other outcomes of SEO for the marketing department as a whole: advertising your products or services to self-qualifying customers, creating a pull strategy to draw customers into your website, and building trust and authority amongst your customers.
SEO builds brand credibility. People will often perceive brands listed in Google’s top positions as worthwhile and trustworthy. You don’t want your customers asking, “Why aren’t you listed in Google for your [core product]?” Consumers have come to expect that big brands or brands worthy of their business be listed in the major Search Engines.
The ultimate long term SEO benefit that all marketing departments strive to achieve is a sustainable competitive advantage. By outperforming competitors websites in the Search Engines your business earns the upper edge that is hard to take away.
SEO Helps Human Resource Departments Attract Talented Employees
This department is often overlooked in terms of SEO benefits. But with a highly visible site it is much easier to recruit and attract qualified people to work for your business.
Being ranked in a top three position by Google for your core products shows potential employees that you are an industry leader! This builds confidence that your business is a good place to work and helps your HR department build a qualified workforce.
SEO Helps Public Relations Departments Grow Brand and Reputation
Image is everything. Have you ever gone to a website only to be unimpressed with the site’s design and relevance to the brand? Or worse yet, you failed to find a company’s website?
Most of the time these unfortunate events tarnish the company’s image its PR department works hard to build. An easily searched and optimized website that is both attractive and useful presents a professional brand image to all of its visitors.
In addition to promoting the company image, an optimized website gives PR employees the capabilities to broadcast latest company news and upcoming events so that information gets heard by the intended parties. The optimized site may also have a blog, RSS feed and press release strategy to help the PR department disperse important information efficiently.
SEO Helps Finance Departments Track Dollars and Growth
Because their ultimate goal is to maximize shareholder value Finance Executives often want cold hard numbers to match outgoing expenses with incoming revenues.
The ability to track almost every move a visitor to your website makes will also make it easy to report on how SEO is performing. SEO provides your Finance department with analytics data and measurable results – unlike traditional marketing.
Furthermore, SEO is easy to budget for since it has a relatively fixed monthly cost as compared to other online marketing campaigns like PPC where cost is dependent on the number of clicks made.
SEO Help IT and Web Design Departments Improve Site Performance, Uptime, and Security
The process of SEO forces your IT department to use best practices in web standards and design so that your website is easily accessible to Search Engine robots and people.
By measuring the performance of a website, SEO can be used by IT and Webmasters to improve the website’s design, source code, layout and functionality in order to improve the overall performance.
Minor adjustments throughout the SEO process can make a large impact on time spent on site, bounce rates and conversion rates. SEO equips your IT and Web Department members with the insight needed to make relevant changes to improve your overall site performance.
Do you see any other areas that SEO is benefiting your business? Leave a comment.
Are you ready to apply Search Engine Optimization to all your business’ departments? Give 1st on the List Promotion a call at 1-888-262-6687 or submit our SEO Contact Form to get in touch with our SEO consultants.