There is something many biased sources (e.g., content marketing and SEO agencies) “forget” to tell you:
Ranking content doesn’t bring in organic traffic forever. Yes, if that were true, it would be a great ROI long-term.
And there were indeed times when never having to update a piece of ranking content almost applied.
But now, to keep your content where it is in terms of rankings, you need to update it at least once a year.
If you get taken over by a competitor who outranks you, you must update and improve it however often necessary.
Oh, and then there is the whole off-page SEO area (e.g., link building).
That’s also something you want to factor into your costs.
High-authority quality backlinks only come automatically to you in rare cases.
So it mostly means buying these backlinks or guest posts.
Yes, you may get backlinks organically from time to time.
This happens when you produce quality content, because other websites may like to share what you have to say.
But that’s not something you can control.
To control this a bit, you also need to proactively build backlinks.
So when good backlinks mean good rankings over time, then… bad backlinks mean…?
Exactly, decreasing rankings or even a Google update penalty.
That’s called negative SEO, by the way, and it’s a real thing.
I would also call it a “digital marketing security threat.”
Some competitors just don’t play fairly and prefer the dark side.
So they hire someone for cheap overseas to attack your rankings with hundreds and thousands of spammy backlinks (this has also happened to me, by the way).
To counter this means more costs to monitor your backlinks constantly.
When you see something fishy, you want to tell Google that you didn’t build these links.
And then you cross your fingers that Google does get your message.
The SEO term for this is called disavowing backlinks.
Now, in the case of social media posting, you will end up fast on a social media content treadmill.
You will have to continuously put out more and more content.
Why is that?
That’s firstly to satisfy the algorithm of the platform of choice to give you your desired reach (impressions).
Secondly, it’s because of the diminishing returns of organic reach every social media platform goes through over time.
By the way, besides SEO and organic Google traffic, social media content marketing is another of these “marketing ROI black boxes.”
It’s pretty difficult to measure performance.
And what happens with the influx of AI content, both in written and soon in video format (keyword OpenAI’s “Sora”)? You again need to put in much more effort to defend the organic traffic you may still get from Google and organic reach on social media platforms.
So in short, based on all the above, I wouldn’t have SEO and content marketing as a top priority for your lead generation.
And less so when you are starting your lead generation journey.
- Because it’s not as effective as it is sold.
- There are methods and traffic channels that get you faster results, faster feedback on your offers, and more control over your lead generation.
Besides, to shoot you down, a competitor has to rely more on actual performance (better offer, better sales copy, better ad copy, better targeting, etc.) and can’t resort to spammy backlink attacks from overseas.
I am talking about media buying, which includes running PPC ads on search engines and ads on social media platforms.
Just to be clear, I am not saying to never do SEO and content marketing.
Instead, I would rather consider them as marketing channels you can use once you have proven one thing.
It’s that you can buy a customer at market price on paid channels and turn a profit. What happens when you have successfully done that?
You will have enough data and can align your SEO and content strategy to the offer you have already proven through paid traffic methods.
And if the algorithms suddenly don’t like you anymore, you can fall back on what already works.