With recent data privacy trends and rising advertising costs, companies must reevaluate how they can be found by their customers without escalating marketing spend.
SINGAPORE – 24 September 2021 – Stridec Worldwide (“Stridec”), a Singapore-based SEO agency recently awarded by Clutch as one of the top SEO companies in Singapore for 2021, is advocating for businesses to adopt a SEO-centric approach to their digital marketing strategies moving forward, to establish and maintain their digital presence across the internet, in light of the recent developments announced by tech giants such as Apple and Google with regards to data privacy of users online.
With Apple’s rollout of its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, and Google’s move towards scraping third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, the impact and implications to advertisers worldwide who have religiously relied on such technologies for their audience targeting and marketing campaigns cannot be overstated.
The issue of user data privacy and tracking people’s online activity is a thorny one that has been the subject of heated debate for years. In recent years, the consumer public has become increasingly vocal about this issue, and with more governmental regulations on how tech companies handle such data, it is inevitable that leading tech companies will make moves to appease their massive user bases while also strengthening their market positions.
Such developments have for better or worse created yet another set of challenges for businesses – especially the smaller players – to overcome, while still navigating their way through a plethora of digital marketing complications amid a weak economy brought on by the worldwide pandemic. Many advertisers have already expressed fear that their campaigns will be less effective and precise than before, resulting in increased marketing costs yet with poorer results.
Businesses need a more long-term, viable and sustainable approach to establishing their online presence without having to be held ransom every now and then by the shifting digital marketing landscape.
The answer lies in search engine optimisation (SEO), and Stridec has been advising brand and business owners to recalibrate their digital strategies with SEO being the centrepiece around which other marketing tactics revolve.
“SEO is the only marketing instrument that does not depend on invasive user data to achieve its objectives and generate the desired results”, explained Mr. Alva Chew, resident SEO expert and consultant at Stridec.
“SEO does not need to know nor track your audience’s demographic details, online buying history, or browsing behaviour, to work. All you need to get SEO to work is users’ search intent, which can be gleaned from publicly available data, simply by taking a deeper read into the search engine results that show up whenever you perform a search,” Mr. Chew elaborated.
Shifting to an SEO state of mind that grounds the brand’s overall digital marketing strategy has paid off nicely for both consumer-facing and B2B businesses that have embarked on it.
A Singapore homegrown bakery has been able to grow its online sales for birthday cake as well as festive products such as mooncakes and CNY goodies from scratch, purely on the strength of its SEO strategy, generating on average 5 times the return on investment (ROI). More importantly, it was able to reduce spending on social media ads without a decline in sales.
In addition to sidestepping the limitations brought about by the aforementioned data privacy changes, adopting an SEO-oriented marketing methodology serves as a long-term replacement for tactical, in-the-moment marketing activities that do not build and accumulate benefits over time.
Understanding this, an established security company specialising in CCTV camera surveillance has focused heavily on search engine optimisation and managed to maintain its market share against larger competitors while at the same time expanding into new opportunities that yield new revenue streams, through its strong ranking performance on the search engines.
Besides Apple and Google, other technology companies, including Microsoft, are also actively looking into replacing current tracking technologies such as cookies and user identification with newer implementations, such as contextual targeting, implying a more fragmented marketing ecosystem in the future.
Businesses and their marketing teams will have their work cut out for them moving forward. It is therefore crucial that they build their marketing strategies on a foundation that remains stable and sustainable over a long period of time, and SEO leads the pack in this regard.
Companies would do well to quickly realign their current marketing activities to the new reality and establish SEO at the heart of the overall online strategy to improve their winning chances. And Stridec is ready to help them on this journey.
About Stridec Worldwide
Stridec is a digital marketing agency that specialises in SEO and Ecommerce solutions with a mission to help brands Get Found Online. Using its proprietary “Awesome in B.E.D.” framework, Stridec helps businesses acquire more traffic, customers and revenue to stay ahead of the competition and dominate their markets.
Stridec focuses on helping clients build long-term, strategic online assets that deliver sustainable Return on Investment (ROI) for years to come.
