Chase Robertson and Ryan Woods are co-owners of SEO Strategies, an SEO and Inbound Marketing firm in Madison, Wisconsin.

Until you are able to accurately measure your marketing performance, the impact and value of your marketing efforts are lost. As a marketing professional you must use sound business practices to drive your business growth and profitability. Unfortunately, the tactics used by many companies to drive growth in their industry are not achieving that goal. Today’s data shows that 94% of companies say SEO and 78% say Inbound Marketing are “not contributing to bottom line profitability.” Analytics tells us that SEO will not help you reach that goal. However, the majority of companies use, as well as try, both strategies. What they fail to realize is that running either of these campaigns solely as cost-effective optimization strategies is not effective.

The beauty of SEO is that you can run your website’s SEO campaign without taking on additional marketing costs. In addition, the reality is that most marketers are not good marketers. SEO is an excellent marketing tool, but using it as an end in itself to drive growth and profitability is too costly for many companies. Additionally, it needs to be used as part of a marketing plan to achieve tangible measurable goals and ROI.

The bottom line is that social media marketing is a great way to promote your brand and products, but your promotion needs to be qualified to show value in order to garner a successful marketing return. That will ensure your marketing, technology and strategy work together to drive measurable results and growth.

Search engine optimization can be implemented within a few hours. Most platforms allow for homepage revamp, change in URL and minor changes to update your site. Since you control all of the SEO aspects, you can rest assured that it will remain viable as the top priority when it comes to driving traffic to your site. That being said, SEO is not the only option available when it comes to leveraging marketing for brand image, and it should be used as an important part of your marketing mix, just like Google AdWords and search engine optimization.

Marketing Inbound is not about marketing exclusively to social media platforms. It is about placing marketing in the hands of marketers that have been trained how to effectively use both Google AdWords and SEO to drive website traffic and download action within their entire organization.

However, there are different models used to achieve return on investment of SEO campaigns. An SEO Campaign Optimization Master Plan can be done on your own time and space to optimize your website quickly to drive traffic and inbound search traffic while using SEO to build the brand and customer trust in your strategy. In addition, you can use Search Engine Metrics to measure performance against ROI metrics.

By using both these tools you will achieve solid return on investment, and ultimately grow your business. Your brand will benefit from an entirely new, stronger competitive positioning, and you will have an elevated return on marketing expenses and brand investment. It is time to reconsider your marketing effort and change course to once again benefit from the strongest financial results possible. By choosing effective SEO and Inbound Marketing strategies you will increase your SEO rankings, increase traffic to your website and drive download action.

(For more information about SEO and SEO strategies visit SEO Strategies)