SEO Benchmark Report – Challenges To Objectives and Effectiveness To Difficulty

Working from home includes many SEO marketing efforts, challenges and future objectives we try to achieve. But are we matching courses of actions to our own definition important challenges? According to a report by MarketingSherpa, not always… Also, the report demonstrate the connection between SEO tactics effectiveness and level of difficulty.

Matching Actions To Objectives

The report has found that some of the most important SEO challenges we perceived, may be different from what we will define as objectives for the future:

Comparing SEO challenges with SEO objectives.
Comparing SEO challenges with SEO objectives.

Let’s rank the most frustrating SEO challenges and compare them to the top future most important objectives for the next year, to examine their compatibility:

Top challenges:

  1. Increasing traffic
  2. Increasing lead generation
  3. Developing an effective strategy
  4. Increasing measurable ROI
  5. Social media
  6. Brand reputation
  7. Sales revenue

Top Future Objectives:

  1. Increasing traffic
  2. Increasing lead generation
  3. Brand reputation
  4. Increasing measurable ROI
  5. Sales revenue
  6. Social media
  7. Developing an effective strategy

Contradictions:

1. While developing a strategy perceived as a top challenge, most people/businesses don’t put it as a high objective. Funny enough, measuring the strategy considered more important than the strategy itself!

2. Although improving the brand/product reputation only considered the 6th top challenge, it is the 3rd objective for next year.

Conclusions:

You should relate to developing an effective strategy as a top objective and not giving, paradoxically, more importance for how to measure it!

Improving our brand awareness and reputation is pretty important, but definitely not more than marketing on the social media (which can also strengthen our brand) or creating an effective marketing strategy.

 

Effectiveness Compared To Difficulty

The report also demonstrate the relations between SEO tactics effectiveness and its level of difficulty:

 

Effectiveness Compared To Difficulty
Effectiveness Compared To Difficulty

We can see that creating content is the most effective SEO tactic, however it is also the most difficult one. Creating external links is even more difficult but less effective. I guess we know who wins the battle between backlinks and content…

Very easy-to-achieve SEO tactics and highly effective are the title tags and the meta description tag. Therefore writing and optimizing them its a must when considering their low level of difficulty!

You are more than welcome to diagnose and suggest your own conclusions from the report!