The compounding effect of SEO
Too often, marketing leaders are in search of the magic bullet that will drive 100% growth in a single year and neglect the improvements that will just grow 20%.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for SEO and content strategy. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
Featured links
Check out the 100th LIVE episode of SERPS up .
Move beyond manual outreach for PR with SearchEye.
Email me if you are looking for a digital PR agency that can get placements in reputable media sites and I can introduce you to the agencies who get results.
In investing, whether at an exclusive hedge fund or a basic retirement plan, compounding growth is a more significant driver of returns than lucky timing or discovering massively undervalued opportunities. Compounding is the idea of earning returns—even small ones—that are added to the principle. Put simply: It is generating earnings from earnings.
The longer an investment stays in the market, the more it can earn from the compounding effects of growth. Even if there are times of negative growth, the aggregate periods of positive growth can easily overcome the slower or negative growth periods.
[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]
We analysed hashtags to get massive links for our travel client with Digital PR.
This is exactly how we’ve done it:
▪ We analysed a list of 80 top hotels worldwide to establish which hotels have the most Instagram hashtags
▪ We used Muckrak and Roxhill to find journalists who write about travel
▪ We sent the email to thousands of such journalists
The pitch was well received, with an average open rate of over 35%.
All financial advisors unanimously believe that the best financial decision anyone can ever make is to start investing as early as possible, even if it is just small amounts. Those small amounts will add up to massive sums if they can compound year after year. Putting aside timing and picking a winner, both impossible without a crystal ball, just diving in is the best approach.
To put this into actual numbers, a single $10k investment made into the stock market and then compounded for 40 years will be worth $174k, assuming an average rate of return of 10%. (The historical average return of the S&P is 10.26%)
Compounding marketing
I believe the same holds true in marketing, especially SEO. While there will always be scenarios that unlock hockey stick growth, these will be rare and difficult to uncover. Much attention is paid to viral campaigns or growth hacks that have reaped dividends for years.
Who can ever forget the ChatGPT magical user growth to 100m users, Old Spice videos that responded to celebrities in real-time, or Airbnb’s cross-posting on Craigslist? In truth, while there are dozens of candidates for the most outstanding marketing campaigns of the Internet age, millions have just been duds.
Marketing is a slow process
Real user growth happens from the mundane act of connecting with customers and telling how the products improve their users' lives. Each customer who is persuaded to buy will, depending on the business, buy more/subscribe/pay higher year after year. In addition, these customers will tell others if they have a positive experience.
To put this into more specific numbers, there could be opportunities to grow 100% year over year, but more than likely, there are not very many of them. And, especially for companies that have already plateaued in their demand, these are even less likely. Growth will come from optimizing and improving an already growing user base. A growth rate of 20% (in traffic, revenue, sales, or whatever the key metric might be) will lead to a doubling of the base in less than four years!
Too often, marketing leaders search for the magic bullet that will drive 100% growth in a single year and neglect the improvements that will grow 20%. When they miss their 100% bet, they are still at the same base or even lower.
Read my post on Zapier to see how long it took to create their SEO juggernaut.
Compounding SEO
SEO is the best place to see the effects of compounding within marketing. Most websites’ traffic will continue to rise yearly unless there is a cataclysmic event like a site update or Google penalty. This steady growth happens even if no changes were made to the site for a year – with a caveat, of course, that the site’s content is in an evergreen space. If it were timely, the demand for the content would become stale. (Most websites will have some natural seasonality, no matter the space.)
This means that as a site generates traffic from Google, it continues to accrue the positive signs, allowing it to generate even more traffic as time goes on – the effect of compounding. Over time, the site will accumulate natural links, good user experiences that feed into search visibility, and broader deeper indexing as Google’s AI improves. At the same time, it will grow naturally, with more people using Google and the Internet – let’s call that the inflation rate.
Neglecting compounding
Just like in investing, where there are too many people sitting on the sidelines of the market because they are waiting until they have enough money to invest or are looking for the right opportunity, the same happens in digital marketing and SEO. People who don’t invest in SEO agree that SEO is a great place to generate users and customers; instead, they think that the time is not right.
The best time to invest in SEO is six months before it is needed, but it is impossible to know when that will arrive. Again, like investing, a little effort now is better than no effort.
Admittedly, SEO does take a long time to build a solid base, and while it's growing, it seems so slow. It is hard to justify efforts in SEO when maybe a paid marketing team is spending huge sums and returning amounts just as significant. However, doing the right thing isn’t always fun. Without trying to start building out SEO, compounding can never begin.
Let the compounding begin
Without compounding, there will be no triple-digit growth in a few years. The best hope for anyone who ignores SEO is that their competitors ignore it too because, like in the financial markets, it’s tough to catch up to those that started earlier and smarter unless… you are just lucky.
If there is an opportunity for SEO (meaning there is a product market fit for search), you should have already started building, but if you haven’t started yet, today is the day.
Brought to you by North Star Inbound—the sales enablement SEO agency.
Other agencies waste your time producing 1000s of pages that don’t generate sales.
North Star Inbound is laser-focused on 10% of topics you can and MUST own to drive revenue.
And they use those to deliver ROI in months instead of years.
And if you need the content produced, they handle that, too.
BigRentz grew from 27K visits to over 400K, with SEO sales beating PPC.
A dental client went from 0 to $137K in monthly revenue from SEO in under a year.
Book a call for a free content audit and 10% off any engagement.