Headway Marketing sometimes works with small businesses that, sometimes, are still young in their understanding of digital marketing. This feature is written in response to those that need to take their awareness of some of the intricacies of digital marketing a little further and, I hope, for those of us that are proficient in these disciplines, provides a perspective that is still thought provoking.
Search Engine Marketing consists of two things:
SEO + PPC = SEM
This post looks at how to improve the effectiveness of Search Engine Marketing. But first, let’s tackle the acronyms!
- Search Engine Marketing = SEM
- Search Engine Optimisation = SEO
- Pay Per Click = PPC
- Business-to-Business = B2B
- Business-to-Consumer = B2C
There are loads of agencies that (genuinely) will add significant value to your bottom line through optimising your website. These guys perform SEO. Typically, this process is in part technical and in part creative. More on that in a bit.
Equally, there are loads of agencies that (genuinely) will add significant value to your bottom line through managing your search engine advertising. These are PPC specialists and will happily give your money to Google, Yahoo and Bing (mainly Google) in return for directing ‘qualified’ traffic to your website. More on that too.
This discussion is about how to improve the effectiveness of SEM – your presence on search engines. And, for me, its starts with your customer.
“Your customer is a human. They have a name, a gender, a role, … They ‘are’ and they ‘do’.”
I trust it is quite clear from the content of this site that the philosophy of Headway Marketing is based upon the need to ‘Know Your Customer‘. A significant point of this is the acceptance that your customer is a human. They have a name, a gender, a role, a preferred contact mechanism, a lifestyle that requires engagement with you in someway. They ‘are’ and they ‘do’. As a business (whether B2B or B2C) you still sell to a human – the product or service might not be consumed by a human, but the process of selling still relies on a relationship to be formed (even if all the contact is electronic).
OK, you sell to a human. SEM is about getting humans to engage with your website. Not just humans, but people that might have an interest in what you do, enough interest to actually buy your goods and services.
Great SEO deals with technical elements of your website and ensures that the URL, the meta detail, the titles and images support the valuable, customer-focused expressions used. It also creative, telling stories sometimes of 1,000 words, sometimes in 140 characters that drive engagement with the content. All based around what your customers want to hear you say.
Great PPC creates a theme that the searcher is able to express at the point of their search query and continues through to their enquiry. The word, the ad, the landing page, the products, the supporting content and the means or reason to make contact, all resonate around your target customer’s thought process that drove them to make the search in the first place.
SEM allows you to begin to personalise your marketing and drive qualified traffic to your site.
How do you make Search Engine Marketing more effective?
Yes, there are independent traits of both disciplines (SEO and PPC) that will help and drive gains, however, Headway Marketing is of the opinion that the answer lies in the intersection of SEO and PPC.
The common ground of effective SEO and PPC is content.
A great PPC campaign is one that advertises on the right keywords that your customers use to find you, and those that your competitors are advertising on and, crucially, not advertising on, keywords that are reinforced in the ad copy to grab your prospects’ attention, that then feature on an engaging landing page that addresses the problem the web-visitor is seeking to resolve. The visitor is then invited to read the proof of success from clients, or learn more about the product or service and even encouraged to sign up, download, experience and talk with a specialist…
A great SEO campaign is one that identifies the right keywords that your customers use to find you, and those that your competitors are ranking on and, crucially, not ranking on, keywords that are reinforced in webpage copy to grab your prospects’ attention… you can see what is going on… There is a great correlation between the processes involved with SEO and with PPC.
“Great content will enhance the impact of SEO and PPC, captivate readers, give readers a reason to come back and persuade positive engagement.”
The trigger for the success of both Marketing tools is the same – words. A great Content Strategy will enhance the impact of SEO and PPC; providing new keyword-rich content that captivates readers, that gives readers a reason to come back to your sites and that persuades the visitor to positively engage with the brand or even make an enquiry.
Benefits of a Content Strategy
Keyword Identification
By implementing a Content Strategy, you get to know the words that your customers use to express the problem they are facing, the words that they identify with – not what you think – but what they think. There is a difference! You create content that addresses these words and phrases, that features content that a human will respond to – insights, information, data, advertising, case studies… all content that humans absorb and that search engines will dissect.
Competitor Analysis
In understanding what keywords your customers use to find you, you need to consider the keywords your competitors use. While the mantra is ‘Know Your Customer’, it could be stretched to include ‘Know Your Competitors Customers’! Getting to know what you are competing against allows you to identify your differentiate and the keywords that you can excel in that your competitors can’t.
Fuel for Repeat Visitors
You will know from your analytics that a certain percentage of web visitors will ‘convert’ (whether an enquiry, purchase, sign up or some other action) on their first visit; you will will know how many times other web visitors will go to your site before they sign up. What they are after is more information – more compelling reasons to progress engaging with your company; a great Content Strategy provides this.
Links
While the nature of ‘backlinks’ has changed, links remain important. Creating research, insights and other content that other organisations – or even more preferable, journals and publishers, can link to, remains important for both SEO and for brand awareness. Besides, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about! (Credit goes to Oscar Wilde for that.) Research suggests that there is not much weighting on the quantity of ‘likes’, but certainly having social advocacy helps expand the reach of your message and therefore the likelihood of acquiring quality links back to your hosted content.
Brand Awareness
Becoming an authority on your specialist subject can present you with phenomenal opportunities, including responding to news items across multiple media channels. Typically being a presenter at a conference is going to cost upwards of £10,000, giving you the right to hold court with delegates; the balance tips when you are the authority and become in demand because your opinion adds value to the conference. A great Content Strategy finds the insights, the views, the nuggets of information that will position you as the go-to authority, increasing your brand awareness.
Pay Per Click
More relevant keywords helps acquire more relevant visitors and the content helps them convert.
SEO
More relevant content helps search engines know what web searchers will find on your site, and will direct targeted visitors.
A Content Strategy is how you can improve the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing
A Content Strategy is a valuable feature of an over-arching Marketing Strategy that, get it right, can improve the effectiveness of your search engine marketing and, in time, could reduce the cost of online advertising! It needs patience, time and a creative team that writes, illustrates, researches and socialises but the potential benefits are great. People read and they are persuaded by stories that they can relate to. Know your customer and you will know what words to write that triggers them to behave in the way that you want them to!
If you do not have the resource in house to add content to your agenda, Headway Marketing would be delighted to help! Get in touch and we will respond: