What’s Your SEO Objective–Rankings or Revenue?

What do search engine optimization (SEO) rankings mean for your business? Do SEO rankings translate to sales? Should you be focusing on the ranking movements at all? These are just some of the questions that marketers address daily and business owners should be asking.

At HubSpot’s 2023 INBOUND Marketing Conference, Dale Bertrand, President of Fire&Spark, tackled those questions in his session, “SEO for Revenue: Grow Your Business, Not Just Your Rankings.” During his presentation, Dale argued the need for businesses to focus on SEO for revenue, not SEO for rankings. While the perspective is somewhat provocative and compelling, it's important to consider your business and the goals you have established before settling on an approach.

It's important to understand that at the forefront of any SEO strategy should be your audience’s intent when they search online. Knowledge of your target audience and what makes them tick–their motivations, likes, dislikes, goals, and frustrations–are all vital to building a successful content marketing strategy, which includes SEO.

Google is smart enough to understand why someone is using a specific search term or asking a specific question. Semrush says, “Google has put a lot of effort into interpreting the intent behind search queries used in search.” The thing about Google is, it just keeps getting smarter, too.

SEO for Rankings: Why New Businesses May Want to Start Here

SEO for rankings means generating content for your target audience that gets noticed by search engine crawlers and grows in rankings over time. Higher rankings means more website traffic, which means more opportunities to convert visitors into leads.

Dale refers to SEO for rankings as the “old school way” of doing SEO. If you’re a new business with a limited understanding of your target audience(s), limited sales-driven content, or limited data about your content’s performance, we believe there is value in starting with this “old school” approach as a means to gather data and refine your strategy over time.

If you’re a new business or you have a small website that needs more content, you should still keep your audience’s intent at the forefront of your strategy. You don’t want to just start your SEO strategy chasing keyword rankings. Start with understanding your audience’s needs and intentions–align your content and calls-to-action (CTA) based on your buyer’s perspective. If you chase keywords first, “You’re not going to convert because the intent is wrong,” says Dale.

When you have content that aligns with your buyer’s intent, it will set you up for higher search engine rankings. When those rankings provide you more website visits and data, that will help you shift to SEO for revenue strategy.

Start Slow to Go Fast

We recommend starting slow to go fast. You have to till the garden before you can nurture the crop, so to speak. Before you jump into creating content based on high-volume keywords, you have to start by getting to know your target audience. One recommended strategy for this is persona development.

This process will help shape your content marketing strategy and therefore, your keyword strategy. Knowing what terms your buyer personas are searching for along their journey helps develop your overall content marketing strategy and define realistic goals for each piece of content you develop.

It’s a natural progression of going from SEO for rankings to SEO for revenue. However, what many businesses and marketers miss is that search intent should be the lead driver in any sound content marketing strategy. Lead with intent and match your content to it. As Dale said, “Keyword tools are not as valuable as communication with customers.”

The Goal of SEO for Revenue

SEO for Revenue is shifting your focus from rankings and traffic to conversions and sales. Instead of targeting high-volume keywords, you target high-intent customers. The research also shifts from keyword demand to customer needs. Here’s again where a solid understanding of your target audience(s) is vital. Like every SEO strategy, it’s going to take time and likely some trial and error to find what works for your unique business.

If your business is well-established and has thousands of organic traffic sessions per month, hopefully you are using an integrated CRM that can clearly show where your new customers originated from and what content they interacted with. In that case, your SEO goal should be revenue, and this is much more feasible with the necessary tools in place to measure conversions and sales.

While there’s value in both models for differing reasons, there is a clear ROI on SEO for revenue as opposed to SEO for rankings. And at the end of the day, the way a business survives is revenue. Dale notes that a best practice they follow at his agency is to update their strategies every six months. It’s good practice to review reporting metrics every six months to indicate what’s working, what’s not, and how to shift for optimal results.