Marketers believe that creating high-quality content is the most effective SEO strategy, according to a new study by customer intelligence solutions enterprise Clutch. More than a third of the marketing professionals surveyed said that publishing content across the web would be their top priority for driving search results during the next 12 months.

The Enterprise Marketing Survey 2016: Search Marketing Results report featured responses from 500 marketers made up of both B2B and B2C companies. Perhaps the most surprising statistic from the study is that just 47 per cent of those surveyed said that they now run search optimisation campaigns, despite their critical importance to all forms of online marketing.

The report noted that many large corporations still prioritise “demand-driving channels” such as television and social media over SEO, even though they know they need to incorporate a successful search strategy to prosper in the long term. Some don’t have a specific SEO budget either, due a crossover of time and resources with other IT and marketing activities.

Traffic volume

For those who are managing SEO campaigns, 28 per cent said that traffic volume was the most important metric for gauging success. This figure was higher than leads and conversions (23 per cent), onsite engagement (19 per cent), keyword rankings (16 per cent) and impressions, awareness and sentiment (15 per cent).

Moving onto content, the VP of digital at marketing agency R2i, Kara Alcamo, says that progressive companies are now looking at the bigger picture and producing relevant blog posts and videos for a larger marketing campaign rather than simply focusing on the benefits for SEO.  In the report, utilising social media to support SEO (20 per cent) and local search (14 per cent) were also cited by marketers as preferred tactics for optimisation.

“Modern SEO is about the customer experience and working with other marketing channels,” Be Found Online's president and chief of search at digital marketing agency, Dan Golden, adds. “SEO content and customer content are not separate silos. Content needs to be created for both humans and search engines.” Overall, 22 per cent of marketers said that television was still their go-to channel, ahead of social media (16 per cent), websites (12 per cent), events (seven per cent), print (five per cent) and paid search ads (five per cent).