How Active SEO Can Drive Down Customer Acquisition Costs
How Active SEO Can Drive Down Customer Acquisition Costs
Fourth-grade math taught us all about the concepts of profit and loss, skills we refined as we played Monopoly or ran summertime lemonade stands as kids. These may be basic concepts, but they apply to every business endeavor you undertake as an adult.
The goal of business is always to spend less and earn more — to scale down expenditure and scale-up revenue. To achieve that, you need to find the most cost-effective ways to acquire new customers. In a world where business and advertising is done largely online, this means you need to reduce your customer acquisition costs (CAC) while increasing sales.
But how exactly do you do that, when your ads aren’t working and your traffic is stagnant? One easy way to find more customers without spending a ton of money is by adopting active SEO.
In this piece, we'll discuss CAC and what it means for your business. We'll also show you how to use active SEO to land your CAC (and other KPI) where you want it.
What is Your Customer Acquisition Cost?
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) refers to the costs you incur while trying to attract a new customer. It encompasses all such things as ad expenditure, sales team salaries, and marketing team salaries. CAC is important because it tells you whether your business ventures and your marketing efforts, are profitable or not.
Generally speaking, an ideal CAC is one that has a ratio of 3:1 (where 3 represents profit and 1 represents cost). Achieving an “ideal” (or better) CAC may sound awfully difficult, especially if you’ve tried multiple advertising or marketing approaches. But a highly underestimated strategy, one you don’t usually tie directly to CAC, is utilizing strong active SEO.
Why Use Active SEO?
Stats show that the average business spends between $9,000 and $10,000 monthly on Google advertising campaigns, totaling $108,000 to $120,000 per year for an average bear. The size and scale of your business affect your spending, but even for an average business, those numbers represent a pretty significant chunk of your annual budget.
So, while paid traffic is a good digital marketing strategy, relying on it too much may not always be the right decision when you’re trying to drive down your CAC. Good SEO is an extremely effective tool that complements other marketing efforts, and it’s significantly less expensive than many other strategies.
Active SEO requires you to be more, well, active in maintaining a lively web presence. Engaging in active SEO is all about the ongoing work you do online to stay relevant, worthwhile, and helpful to your customers. It’s about creating and maintaining value.
There is a lot that goes into good active SEO, but it’s crucial to have a balance between your technical site optimization and outstanding, functional content creation.
Learning to make the most of active SEO will not only help you lower your CAC, but you’ll also give your SEO score a major boost as you drive more qualified leads.
How to Use Active SEO to Reduce CAC
Active SEO focuses on honing your digital presence and giving search engines a good reason to feature you at the top of SERPs. To rank well, you’ve got to anticipate the needs of your customers and present yourself as the best way forward.
Nail the following to amp up your active SEO and improve your digital marketing efforts:
Craft Better Content
We all know that content is king, and this case is no exception. Smart website copy, with plenty of keywords, is the first step. Keeping that site content updated on the regular is an ongoing task you have to commit to afterward.
Creating and posting regular blogs is the most common and effective element of active SEO. Spot-on active SEO starts with creating articles that are relevant to your services and establish you as a thought leader in your industry
The use of valuable keywords in up-to-date site copy, coupled with compelling blog posts is a huge step in the right direction. Before you start writing, you’ve got a few things to think about.
Know Your Audience
The goal of digital marketing is to attract the right people to your website and get them to convert. And to do that, you first need to completely understand your target audience.
Once you know what your audience wants, needs, or hopes for, you can find the best ways to present yourself as the best solution to their problem. To get to know your consumer, start by talking to them. Engage on social media, conduct surveys, and start discussions.
You can even turn to your data to learn more about what your customers want, under the surface. Tracking site behavior and user characteristics can help you get to know the audience you already have.
Understand How Search Engines Work
SEO is about more than keywords. Search engines rank websites in order of merit, ranking sites higher when they follow the rules of engagement and deliver what web users are searching for. In every vertical, there are thousands of businesses competing for the top spot on SERPs. The challenge is to beat everyone to it by truly delivering on the promises of your headlines and keywords suggestion.
Become an Authority in Your Field
Just writing about topics you know isn’t going to cut it here. You can write an article all about your industry, hot trends or popular searches within it, but if you’re not creating real value for readers, your articles are simply space holders. Add value to your content by giving real advice and solving problems. The more you help your audience, the more they’re going to want to become a client.
Build High Quality Links
External links, or backlinks, always work best when they come from reputable sites that are relevant to your specialty or industry. When links come from a site with authority (one that’s been well established and is not associated with spam).
When you lead users to your blog, via valid partner sites or tempting links on social media, you’re effectively driving your target audience straight to your website. You might also consider a campaign to link to your blogs and other engaging content through partner or affiliate sites.
Measure your results
Continuing down a road that doesn't seem to lead anywhere is counterintuitive. So, somewhere along your SEO journey, take a pause and measure your results against your KPIs. If your SEO is powerful and effective, KPIs like Customer Acquisition Cost is going to improve.
It always helps to track, measure, and analyze your performance as you implement and maintain new strategies.
Looking at the Long Game
Active SEO is truly a long game, and although it may take some time and some active effort to drive your results, you’ll ultimately spend less to land the clients you really want to work with.
Your CAC must be worth your while. It must add to — not drain — your coffers. Create better content, then share and network to the best of your ability. Leverage social media to push your SEO efforts, and never pass up the chance to talk or write about your business.
There may be a lot of creative strategies out there for driving down your CAC, but active SEO is something you can start doing on your own, right now. Don’t be afraid to jump in and make it happen.
