Collaborating with SEO professionals is key to improving rankings in search and is a sign that a company has a “high maturity” approach to optimisation, a new survey from Conductor has found.
The findings, presented in the State of Organic Marketing in 2022: Top SEO Priorities report, show that businesses with an inward-looking, siloed approach to SEO seldom achieve success and typically have a “low maturity” strategy in place.
Collaborating across the business and with third-party agencies offering SEO services helps to create a robust infrastructure that can work through challenges, navigate bottlenecks and create content that is aligned with customers’ needs.
This was evident during the pandemic, as the study found that those with higher levels of organic maturity were better able to adapt and thrive.
While Covid-19 was initially disruptive, the majority of marketing teams say that the changes they made during the period have had either a “large” or “slight” positive impact on budgets, productivity and achieving strategic goals.
Affordable strategies such as SEO are primary areas of investment too, as 20% of marketers say their organic budgets have “increased significantly” during the last 12 months, compared to +7% for paid budgets.
That said, “digital advertising” is one of the three strategic channels that digital marketing leaders are leaning into most heavily this year.
The other two are rooted in SEO, with “content marketing” and “website user experience” both top priorities in 2022.
Both of these are intertwined with Google’s recent updates to search, which are heavily weighted towards serving excellent page experiences and relevant content to users.
