My Search Marketing Primer
I’ve consulted on search engine marketing over the past few years, it’s also one of the services I perform at my day job, Tocquigny here in Austin. Of course I’ve seen clients burned by less-than-ethical search marketing providers, likely due to the “mystery” that is cultivated by them and the search engines themselves. (yea, I know search engines have to keep it a secret!)
Given that my background is in information design, I approach search marketing with an organized, more “science” perspective, than an “art” perspective. To that end I break down natural search marketing into four simple categories:
- Site optimization: the ease with which robots and spiders can follow and determine the relevancy of a site (key phrases to list it for) .
- Content: the amount of relevant content pages a site has.
- Links in: the number of relevant and ranked sites that link to a site.
- Traffic: the amount of visitors that go to a site.
Each of these needs attention at the beginning of a project, especially optimization, sometimes known as “on page” efforts. But assuming your traffic is somewhat consistent (perhaps by paid search) your focus should be on generating new, unique and relevant content for your site, and getting links back to it. It’s the number one and two things you can do!As my friend Bill Leake over at Apogee Search shared, establishing the right key phrases to target in your site optimization and your content is also a very important step. It can save you time and effort, as well as mistakes if you target less-than-optimal key phrases. Bill and his team use paid search to inform your natural search efforts, and give you the right key phrases to focus on.
A post on Forrester’s Marketing Blog is asking for reader opinons on priorities in search marketing vendor selection. A few thoughts on their questions:
- Don’t wouldn’t worry about a vendor’s experience in your industry, only that they have worked in several different industries and with several different demographics. Search marketing statistics and user behavior can be VERY different for different industries, from what converts in ad copy, to competition in the space. What’s important is that they can quickly learn new (your) industries well. What’s their approach and methodology? How much research will they do upfront into that industry’s search user behavior?
- Another question is about paid vs natural search, which one is more important. Generally speaking, they can really work well together, and each has their own benefits and liabilities.
Paid search is a great quick way to get some traffic and some learnings about your users… but paying for every click can get costly over time.
Natural search optimization takes a while, but users are known to “believe” in natural results better (when they can tell the difference, as some demographics don’t know there is difference). Not to mention that once you are placed well in natural results, leads/sales are more or less FREE. 8-) - My approach is to start with paid search, analyize your results regularly, and use that data to optimize your site for natural results. Both should always have budget/efforts behind them, it’s just the ratio of each that changes.
I’ve seen tons of budget go towards media/search spend, directing users to the main page of a website! Ouch. There are huge efforts directed towards optimizing ad copy and budgets, but less focusing on landing pages and the customer experience after the click. Testing multiple versions of landing pages and all the way down to sale/lead conversion customer experience is the major area of marketer’s efforts that need attention now. Look for a search marketer that can help you establish multivariate testing for your landing pages (and don’t forget to test your emails and email landing pages too!)
I’ll look forward to what Forrester comes up with. 8-)
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