Powered Inc.'s senior marketing director provides some easily implemented techniques for expanding your brand's natural search footprint.
Without a doubt, search is the centerpiece of marketing on the web. Over 90 percent of internet users regularly use the top-five search engines -- accounting for what’s been estimated as an average of some 6.2 billion searches per month -- to find products, services and information. The Internet Advertising Bureau states it’s the single largest category of online marketing spend. Everybody’s using it and everybody’s doing it.
So is your search engine marketing strategy reaching its maximum potential to get more consumers to flock to your brand? Because sometimes it seems to me the market thinks about it backwards. You’ll hear SEM practitioners (rightly) telling you to focus on structuring sites the right way. But remember, Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” Wouldn’t that mean focusing on what would be most valuable to the user? And wouldn’t that mean starting by creating good content and a great user experience, then encouraging users to share it?
Further, think about the “long tail” and how it has created new opportunities in search engine marketing. The basic idea behind the long tail is that there are a large number of search queries that are individually small compared to queries that contain product names (“HP Photosmart”) or category names (“digital camera”). But taken together, they can deliver sizable traffic to your site. And, some reports claim, these long tail terms convert far better than the more common ones. Search engine marketers are taking steps to address the long tail in their PPC spend. However, some studies have shown that over 85 percent of click volume comes from natural results, which means that long-tail PPC keywords you’ve purchased may only be appealing to 15 percent of the potential search traffic that could be coming to your site.
Luckily, there are three easy -- but likely underutilized -- techniques for expanding your natural search footprint. The key is to focus on creating quality, engaging content, expanding the chance users will find your site. Then you’ll be found more often.
Use engaging educational, lifestyle and category type content
The Online Publishers Association recently published a study stating that web users now spend nearly half their time visiting content, making it the most popular activity on the web. That trend creates opportunity for marketers. Brands generally provide ample content on their products, but few provide content on topics related to their products to attract those long tail searchers. For example, Motorola offers a free online course on how to personalize a mobile device, and HP offers tips and tricks on taking better photographs. Obviously this further engages consumers who are not only thinking about the category, but are likely targets to buy new units, upgrades, accessories and other complementary purchases. As a brand you want to appeal to a wide spectrum of web users, not just ones surgically searching on brand names. You not only engage consumers in a relevant, value-added way, but also add a wealth of “crawlable” dynamic content to your site. Some brands have been able to use this technique to double the number of terms they rank on in the top 30 of search engine results pages. Because you can control how this content is created in the SEO copy writing phase, you have the ability to target specific, long-tail key phrases.
Leverage user-generated content
If your site doesn’t include user-generated content such as message boards, ratings and reviews, you’re missing out on a huge source of crawlable dynamic content. By simply adding the ability for consumers to share their thoughts and experiences on your products or even the content you provide, you’re substantially increasing the crawlable footprint of your site. A desirable part of this strategy is that the content is virtually free -- it’s simply passionate consumers sharing their experiences and points of view with others. Further, since these are the terms that consumers actually use to talk about your products, they are also the terms that consumers are likely to search on when they’re looking for products you sell.
Leverage the content the web creates about your brand
Word of mouth marketers often speak of “joining the conversation.” It’s about recognizing that your brand is being talked about all over the web: on blogs, on consumer review sites, at retail and in message boards. And unlike in the old days of marketing, you can’t stop it, so you might as well participate by monitoring it and contributing to it in all the places your brand shows up.
Another thing you’ll hear word of mouth marketers say is “be worth talking about.” If you embrace the threefold approach outlined above, you create buzzworthy content. That means more content about your brand, not just on your own corporate.com but throughout the web, expanding your brand’s searchability.
Of course, all these suggestions assume you’ve started with industry standard best practices for an optimized site, including the implementation of search-friendly site architecture. Here’s a short checklist:
- Implement a URL structure that makes it easy for search engines to spider your content.
- Avoid using pages that will appear as dynamic to the search engines by using the wrong characters in your URLs.
- Make sure content has a permanent home so search engines have time to find it -- and it doesn’t disappear once it is found.
- Ensure you’re exposing enough content to web users – don’t hide it all behind logins that search engines and users can’t find.
If you have good content and a good user experience, people will link to it, and every link furthers the reach of your site toward potential customers.
Clearly search engine marketing has become one of the most important parts of online marketing for every brand. With some planning and foresight you’ll not only be a more successful search marketer, you’ll incorporate elements of social marketing and Web 2.0 into your mix. The cumulative effect is broader appeal and more users. You’ll see that manifest as the tangible benefits of increased revenue and marketing ROI.
Jeff Petry is senior director of marketing at Powered. Read full bio.
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