Navigating the challenges of search engine optimization activity and business objective

As a business that desires brand sustainability, SEO is a marketing strategy that complements other marketing channels to stay competitive in the ever-changing SERP. The broad activities of SEO cover the on-page, off-page and technical optimization of the website. We can assure you that this is not an easy job to do. So, you need skillful resources and tools. 

The Popular Search Engine to Optimize

Dominating over 70% of the search market share, Google is known as the most used and popular search engine both on desktop and mobile search. This quality potentially brings huge traffic to capture more audience and prospective clients. 

Most internet users will choose the best search engine that serves their needs, and Google is the greatest so far for many reasons. This search engine has an ever-changing algorithm that puts users' needs in its foremost vision. Its ability to provide relevant results and satisfy its users makes it worth optimizing.

Hence, researching your performing keywords in this search engine will give you many benefits. As a search engine with the greatest users, there is no excuse to not optimize your website in it.

Keywords in SEO

Keywords are and will always be an important part of doing SEO. Your audience and prospective customers use it to search for something related to your brand. When it is effectively researched and optimized, it will be a tool that connects your audience with your brand.

Audiences dive into the search engine using their keywords, and you want them to find your brand as their best results. Being right in front of the audience is a must for your business before someone else did. That is why your business needs targeted keywords to catch users' and search engines’ attention.

Keywords are more important than ever when you expand your market to a wider market. You and your team will need to find the high-performing keywords and phrases that people will likely use to approach your brand. By having high-performing keywords, you can rank higher, and reaching potential audiences will be easier.

SEO Activities 

SEO is Google's method of selecting the best pages to get a higher rank on each keyword on the search engine. It is easy for Google to keep its search results fair with SEO.

There are a series of steps taken to maximize the assets on a website such as on-page optimization on the content, and technical side. The checking and planning process is the task of SEO experts to help websites rank on the first page of Google search. If your page meets SEO standards, you'll have a greater chance to win the search result.

There are critical SEO activities that must be done by all SEO stakeholders. Here is the detail.

• Analyze your brand potential traffic: this is the first thing to do after launching a business website. In this stage, you need to identify the potential competitors whether it is direct or indirect competitors. This can be challenging, moreover when you do it in traditional ways.

• Identify potential keywords: Finding what keywords you should use is important to establish feasible goals. However, this analysis needs time and high accuracy. With a helping tool, you can analyze and monitor keywords performance and conduct further research to target your keywords.

• Tracking daily ranking: SERP ranking is a dynamic thing, that is why you must keep an eye on it. Tracking and retrieving daily data of your ranking is not an easy way to do. Furthermore, if your business has a lot of keywords to track. Once you get the tracking information, you can analyze the potential reason behind the ups and the downs of your keywords ranking

• Producing high-quality content: make sure your audience can reach you through multiple channels such as your content. Your content can be a tool that connects you with prospective customers. Make Google see your content, and get your audience to click it.

• Building domain authority: this metric is important to have to make your website seen as a reliable resource for the audience. Google will prioritize your website when your domain authority is high. 

SEO Tool Automation

As a webmaster and SEO specialist, you certainly need a tool that helps your job done effectively. The presence of Sequence Stats as a compact SEO tool will help you simplify complex data calculations to make it more scalable and easy to track. 

Whether you are SEO specialists, marketers, or website owners of all business levels, you should not spend your entire life analyzing your website manually and rely on the raw data. The sequence Stats will be your all-in-one SEO tool to make your job done faster and more accurately.

This tool will simplify the SEO activities we mention above. With its capabilities of serving D-1 crawling frequency, you will get tracking data with ease. Even more, Sequence Stats offers keywords insight that you can use to analyze, research, and optimize your website's current performance.

There was a time when doing SEO was very hard to do on a complex objective since SEO specialists need to do it manually. But, now with advanced technology such as Sequence Stats, you can automate it within one tool.

Local SEO and Internationalization

The challenge will be harder when you come to targeting your business in the market. As a first step, you might want to optimize your business for better local SEO. Local SEO strategy is the way to dominate a certain location for your business. Local SEO will be suitable for SMEs and businesses that focus on a particular area. 

Besides the local SEO, if your business targets a wider market, you will need a multilingual website that targets keywords in both languages. Not all multilingual websites are offered to large-scale businesses. The main goal of owning a multilingual and multiregional website is to localize either the service or product according to the target countries which have access to the web.

If your business is at this level, this will be more challenging since you need to track all your keywords with a certain target region. All teams such as the SEO specialist, marketing team, and writers should collaborate to build a multilingual website to achieve the goal. In this stage, you will really need a helping tool as a medium to execute the SEO plan.

SEO Objectives Variation

Every business has its own objectives when it comes to SEO. However, we need to understand the core reason why we do SEO. The search engine is one of the marketing channels that potentially bring you traffic and sales for your business with unlimited reach. That is why helping users to engage with your website should be the main objective. 

Here are some of the SEO objectives you should set:

• Increase organic traffic;

• Fix website on-page issue;

• Optimize very specific metrics on Google Analytics and Search Console (eg. decrease bounce rate, increase time on page, increase page per session, increase impressions share, gain more clicks, more.

• Get conversion and sales;

• Become a market leader in a specific business sector 

• Increase average ranking from all the targeted keywords

How Much do You Need to Have Working SEO Strategy?

Now you know how complex and urgent SEO is for your business. So, how much do you need to have a working SEO strategy? The answer will vary. 

At mid-level, the budget for SEO services in Southeast Asia markets is around $3000-$5000 or IDR 45.000.000 to 75.000.000. These markets involve startups and enterprises with a total market volume is about 50.000 to 150.000 visitors a month.

Based on our marketing team's calculation of the Indonesia market, here is how much you need to spend on SEO services per month:

• Low level: $1500-$3000

• Mid Level: $2500-$4000

• High Level: $3000-$10000 

Those prices will be different in every country, but we just want to show the approximate budget you need in Asian countries. 

Should You Have an In-house SEO Team or Outsourcing?

Since you know how important it is to use your budget efficiently, you need to consider this matter. Think about how you will have an SEO team to help you achieve your business goal. If your business is stable enough to hire an SEO team (SEO specialists, SEO content writers, and developers), then you might want an in-house SEO team. 

However, look at the budget you will spend to have a complete in-house SEO team. Our team has calculated the approximate budget for building a junior SEO team, you will need around IDR 16 million per month. Potentially more or less,  depends on the company's negotiations with prospective employees. While, for the mid-level SEO needs, the total investment of the SEO team is IDR 23 million per month.

In certain scenarios, the internal team will be more profitable for the company. For example, when the company has a plan to make a product or launch a certain service on a regular basis in a certain period. In this scenario, outsourcing costs will be more expensive.

On the contrary, if you do not need a lifetime SEO plan, outsourcing an SEO team will be more efficient and effective for more business sectors, even across all business levels. You can focus on developing the company's business and managing other things for a bigger purpose. Assign your company's SEO work to the experts, and give your valuable time so that the business can develop. 

Conclusion

All in all, implementing SEO for business is worth the investment. It is the long-term benefits that make it imperative. Helping search engine users to find what they are looking for while offering your business is a noble duty you should carry. So, if you are able to provide high-quality content based on your targetted keywords, you will most likely dominate the search engine results.

SEO can be more complex than what we explain above. It means that it needs special treatment and high-level accuracy. It is your time to make use of the SEO tool that helps you do better SEO.