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Complicated question :smile: Some open-ended thoughts without any numbers.

Honestly very hard to isolate SEO's true impact vs other channels. In modern time, SEO and organic discoverability is good for  industries which yield themselves very well to long-tail discovery. So products and use cases which have a very wide variety of use cases and entry points, so typically horizontal products. Not to say it is not useful for others.

SEO should be seen as a brand marketing effort and not as a lead gen channel in my view. What drives people to your content is their willingness to learn about something, which is a great opportunity to help them learn without being too salesy. This is why you see many companies moving to a hub-and-spoke approach aka pillar page approach in SEO.

I agree — SEO today now has to be more of a brand marketing approach (than a typical lead-gen mindset).  I don’t know (or rather I’m curious to know) if the SEO as a lead-gen channel has now reached its diminishing returns wala phase tbh.

Still doing SEO for leads in 2022.
Using data to build programmatic SEO pages.

This work is independent of content team. Some content is still written to rank but a lot of of it is SEO independent.

30% of inbound leads came from SEO last month.
Trying to push this up to 40% for 2022.


 Actually though, we are building more content for Seo in 2022 as well. We have 3 separate content repositories planned for SEO.

I missed the effort Vs returns bit-
In terms of generating revenue, it's great. Most of cost is in resources(engineers, designers, marketers) which are cheap in India. So the CAC is almost nothing.
And we're closing deals from these leads, so there's a lot of impetus to actually ramp it up even more.


Payback time is difficult to quantify but the work we do typically starts displaying traffic increase within 15-30 days.
Sometime we make mistakes, and that actually cuts down the traffic. This happens within a week. 

So assuming I take the result of work =increase in traffic= leads from increased traffic= deals won from leads from increased traffic.

This process will take around 2.5months.

But of course, we then continue to get increased traffic and leads. It's not a one time thing.

<@U02VB8K88CT> would love to catchup with you, I am new to everything marketing, i have plans to something simialar to what you mentioned, would be nice to grab some learnings :slightly_smiling_face:

<@U02VB8K88CT> even I am curious, how can SEO be content independent, interested to understand same from your experience and also learn more about the ideal approach that we can take up.

<@U031PPF9LTG> I said Content that is SEO independent by which I meant content that is not written to rank.

Nowhere did I say SEO that is content independent.

Programmatic SEO starts with having data. eg <http://shiksha.com|shiksha.com> has data curated on colleges and they generate pages for each college based on that data. 

<@U030SDYNX7V> You can dm me or find me on LinkedIn

<@U02UY3EPQDA> there is a channel called <#C02V6F2JYSH|> and its feeling lonely and left alone

<@U030SDYNX7V> maybe for a reason! :stuck_out_tongue: