Co-Marketing vs Search Engine Optimization
It’s hard to imagine something could work better than search engine optimization (SEO). SEO remains the workhorse of web marketing strategies mostly because it happens without you having to do anything.
Literally, if you launch a new ecommerce store with 250 products on it, Google will find those 250 pages and put them in their search index. If you launch a new blog and write 25 new blog posts, Google will find those 25 pages and will make them discoverable by online searchers.
You don’t have to do anything for this to happen. The days of submitting your website to the search engines are long gone. Today, Google, a multi billion dollar business, can find your website on it’s own. It doesn’t need your help.
So, when most people talk about search engine optimization, they’re talking about things you can do after you build a great website full of great content that is interesting to your target market.
Here’s why.
How Small Businesses Use Search Engine Optimization
Google, and other search engines, make it their full time job to understand the content on your website. Regardless how poorly your website is organized, or how slowly it loads, the search engines figure out how to understand it and package it up for online searchers to find.
Because of this, what most people refer to as the process of search engine optimization, is really a process to extract small improvements in your traffic numbers from the search engines.
Even the most recent search engine scare, mobilegeddon, where Google began deprioritizing search rankings for sites without mobile friendly style sheets, only affected 3-5% of total traffic for most websites.
Search Engine Optimization Delivers Incremental Results
If you’re looking to increase your website traffic by three to five percent, then I strongly recommend spending your time doing search engine optimization.
For large businesses that already receive millions of monthly website visitors, 5% means 50,000 new visitors. That’s a lot. But for the average small business with around 5,000 monthly website visitors a 5% increase in traffic is only 250 new visitors. For smaller websites, it’s even less.
Those levels of results just aren’t worth the extensive effort it takes to do search engine optimization properly.
How Small Businesses Use Co-Marketing
Now, let’s look at how small businesses use co-marketing. Co-marketing refers to the process where multiple businesses work together so everyone achieves better marketing results.
The most common type of co-marketing is guest blogging, where each business writes for their partners’ blogs and their partners write for their blog.
Small businesses, who typically don’t already have large online audiences, use co-marketing to pool their online audiences so everyone wins. Their customers learn about complementary products and services and their businesses get access to new customers they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to reach.
Co-Marketing Delivers Exponential Marketing Results
A small business with 5,000 monthly website visitors might add three co-marketing partners with similar size audiences in a weekend. They’ve now increased their total online audience to 20,000 total people. That’s an increase of 300%.
Finally, co-marketing also helps with one of the most difficult parts of search engine optimization. Remember before I said that SEO pretty much does itself once you have a great website? Well, it’s not always easy to build a great website
Great websites need lots of great content like product pages, product descriptions, blog posts and articles. Time strapped small business marketers often don’t have the time to create all the articles it takes to make their website great.
Co-Marketing Does Search Engine Optimization For You
So, how do you create all that content you need? You don’t. With co-marketing, your partners do all the work for you. Your partners write the articles you need, and you just post them to your website or blog
In fact, when you use a co-marketing tool like BoostSuite, partner articles are automatically posted to your website for you. So you don’t even lift a finger.
To top it all off, in our experience, articles received from co-marketing partners actually attract more new visitors from the search engines than articles you write yourself.
It’s funny, while you’ve been stressing about your search engine optimization, other businesses have been teaming up and doing co-marketing together.
Let your new co-marketing partners lift your business to the top. Try co-marketing and you’ll find thousands of new customers for your business and nail the search engine results you want without even trying.
