An often-heard statement made by people who have heard of SEO but don't fully understand it is: ‘But the site isn't just about SEO!’ Yes, a site is about more than just offering your services or products; it's also about SEO. What good is a beautiful site that is perfectly branded but doesn't attract any visitors?
Let me give you a practical example. One of our clients is one of the larger small energy suppliers. They have been very successful for years, but not because of their site. Their success is due to their offerings and excellent field service. Nothing had ever been done to their site in terms of SEO. Probably a local internet agency threw something together, and it has been running for years without any attention.
Because other players in the market started adopting their way of offering, it was decided to hire an agency for their new branding. We took on the SEO and later a new site would be developed. They realized that their site needed to play a much more prominent role in attracting new customers.
The first thing we did after a quick SEO scan was fix all the errors, such as broken links, duplicate page titles, and other small issues. Then we rewrote all the texts, added meta titles and meta descriptions, and adjusted the slugs and buttons to match the page titles. Finally, we added internal links wherever it was useful and meaningful. With that, phase 1 was complete, and we could start the real work: writing SEO-optimized content.
Results after the first SEO site adjustments
Within seven days, more than twenty important keywords were in the top ten, with the most important keyword being 'gas.' Quite an important keyword for an energy supplier isn't it? :)
This keyword has a search volume of nearly 50,000 in the Netherlands, and they rose from position 52 to position 6! But also keywords like 'electricity price' and 'current energy prices' immediately entered the top ten.
A very good result for an SEO update where we were not allowed to change the site itself. This will bring them tens of thousands of extra visitors per month. Considering that before we performed our SEO optimization, they had only a few hundred visitors, they should be very satisfied, right?
Traditional marketers and SEO
The day before my contact person went on vacation, I received an email with the question to perform and implement the above tasks. While I was just mapping the first results, I received an email from an external marketing and branding advisor asking me to keep her updated on the developments.
Proudly, I sent her an update in which we could also already show the first articles. Nothing gives more satisfaction than giving gifts, because their expectation, given their experience with other marketing and SEO agencies, was that the delivery would take a few weeks.
Less than an hour later, I received an email that they were very shocked internally that everything was already live.
Oops...
I replied that I had really received that order by email and that the marketing manager was in the cc, but that did not help. They absolutely wanted me to revert to the old site.
I presented her with the new ranking and potential search volume, but she did not want to hear it. She and the board found it unacceptable that I had removed their creatively devised slogan from the homepage.
The page started with a header that I can't literally place here. It was something like:
‘Choose creatively, choose wisely. With us, everything is more beautiful’
This absolutely had to come back to avoid panic within the company.
After a final attempt where I explained that these headers add nothing in terms of SEO and actually detract because they say nothing, the often-heard statement followed: ‘But the site isn't just about SEO!’
Well, then you can't say anything more and you know you're dealing with a traditional marketer.
In short, three hours later most of the old site was live again and a day later the ranking dropped back to the old level. They were more proud of their oh-so-original slogan than they wanted to benefit from tens of thousands of extra organic visitors. I wonder if the commercial director and owner think the same, but I haven't gotten in at that level yet.
Consider that they had virtually no traffic, the site's branding had an outdated look, and until then it produced hardly any new customers. As if a slogan would make the difference!?
Do you consider branding with SEO?
Of course, you also take branding into account when optimizing a site for SEO. When it comes to color usage, 100%, but when it comes to texts and slogans, you have to be careful. I'm not talking about the pay-off under a logo, but about slogans that can also be on a poster.
The problem is that search engines do not or barely understand slogans and they usually add no value.
Take our site Become Damn Good, for example, and the slogan "Become the best version of yourself." The two reinforce each other. But a slogan like "Choose creatively, choose wisely. With us, everything is more beautiful" says nothing. It says nothing if you are a supermarket and it says nothing if you are an energy supplier. In that case, you want to replace the slogan with something that includes the word energy. For example, say: "With us, you get energy." But what you shouldn't do is get creative and say: "With us, you'll come out energized," because then you're detracting from the message.
Conclusion
Within every company, choices are made that seem illogical from the outside. I know too little about what is happening internally, but in this case, I can't wrap my head around it. You want more customers, we offer extra traffic, and yet you ignore this. That's like having a clothing store in a back alley with almost no foot traffic. I offer you an almost free A1 location with tens of thousands of pedestrians and arrange your move, and then you say: ‘No, we'd rather go back to our old location because we're so attached to our sign. We once painted it together during a team-building session.’
My background is in strategy, marketing, and communication. My knowledge of SEO came later. Until I had that knowledge, I might have made their choice too, but now that I know better, I might need to take a step back and admit that I haven't made it clear enough to them why what they are doing is not wise. But maybe they don't want to know and are too busy with their internal struggles.
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