According to a new survey, search and PPC are a top small business marketing priority, but many brands aren't yet using the right methods for reaching an audience through SEO.

Asking small businesses to rank their marketing channels isn’t easy – they all contribute different results and serve various purposes. But when push comes to shove and the bottom line is at stake, most content marketers understand other tools come and go, but SEO is still their bread and butter. The problem comes from how to actually execute a search strategy.

According to a recent survey by BIA/Kelsey, search and PPC are the top marketing priorities for small business owners. Other concerns, like email, print and social ads were up there, but they couldn’t knock paid and organic SEO from the top of the heap.

There’s search marketing, and then there’s sophisticated SEO

But search is a broad category, and it’s important to use metrics and tools from all channels to make sure it’s carried out properly. A good example is one of Brafton’s clients that is itself in the tech marketing industry. The company’s site never had trouble getting traffic, but a big reason for the high number of visitors was an existing guest blog program.

Want to understand why Google doesn’t like guest blogs – and if there’s such a thing as good guest blogging? Read this related Brafton article.

Guest blogs and links derived from them were responsible for most  search traffic, but this contributed to a bounce rate over 90 percent for the site’s landing pages. Clearly, it was an untenable position, which is why we suggested radically overhauling the content strategy in order to create more original content.

How did we pull this off? Social listening. To quickly build an audience of interested readers and dedicated industry players, we used tools like SocialRank to see which topics had the most discussions taking place. We then created original blog posts, news articles and graphics that would gain traction among relevant searchers.

Ultimately, the reason most small businesses put such importance on search is because it works, but it can be challenging to pull off correctly. It’s no longer enough to rely on outdated systems like guest blogs or unreliable resources like thin blog content. SEO means dipping one foot into social and understanding what an audience wants to read and how they go about finding it.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.