No matter what business you are in, people are searching for information, products and services relating to your business every minute of every day. In fact the latest statistics show 80%-90% of businesses do online research (usually starting with a Google search) before ever contacting a business.

That means every business needs to understand Search Marketing and some basics around how people search for information, products and services and also how Google provides this information back to them. Armed with this information as a business you can “optimise” your search marketing so you have a better chance of attracting people searching online to your business.

So in a recent Marketing Strategy Show Podcast, we interviewed a digital marketer, Louie Ramos, who has over 15 years experience in helping businesses optimise for attracting the most relevant search traffic.

What’s a SERP?

When you do a search on Google, the answer to your questions are presented in what’s called an SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The goal here is to appear as high as possible in this SERP page. This is often referred to as being “on page one of Google”. But as you can see, there are many types of search results. We would cover this here, but you need to determine your priorities as part of your Search Marketing Strategy.

Your website is the key

Generally, you will be creating your website pages, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google or Build Listing Directory to be ranking higher as that is usually where you want visitors to go as you own the content and can encourage website visitors to learn a little more about your business and build trust.

But for your website to rank higher, it needs to be structured correctly, quickly load the right content, look good on both mobile and desktop. This requires clear Search Marketing Strategy before starting the website.

Structure the Content

To structure the content you must be clear around what:

• Industries or customers you service and
• What problem your products & services solve

Then structure your content logically so that customers can get the information they want quickly. This requires clear marketing strategy/planning before building the website.

Keyword/Phrase Optimisation

When people do a search in Google, they are looking for information on a particular search term or keywords and phrases are and optimise for these. For example, Marketing Consultant, Marketing Strategy Consultant in Sydney and optimise for these.

There is a lot of information on doing keyword research but we would suggest starting with looking at competitor sites using a tool like SemRush or MOZ, Google Keyword Planner (just set up a Google Ad Account) and Google Search Console. Then regularly – maybe once a month – review and update this list.

Once you have identified your “target” keywords, start with around 10 to 20 max that you can provide content for and that have enough search volume (a significant member of prospects are doing that search monthly).

The next step is to optimise your website pages for these 10 to 20 keywords. The best way to do this is to create a content page around one specific keyword and “optimise” that page for that keyword. This is called “keyword mapping”. On this page you will need to optimise headers, written content, videos, “meta tags” and even image description and filenames to maximise your efforts.

Build Internal Links

Google checks or crawls your website by following links in menus and clickable links in your website. So if you have a properly planned internal linking strategy, you make it easy for Google (and users) to find your other pages and therefore they will have more traffic, rank higher and have more traffic – it’s like a cycle.

Build External Links

In terms of links, you need to focus on high authority directories that are regulated (which means that not all links will be approved – they need to be high quality/relevant links).  Don’t just focus on relevancy – you also need to spread your keywords evenly across those links that you build not just put all keywords into one link.  Not just on directories but building more links beyond the directories.

They still need to look natural for Google to love them. Make sure not to link only to your homepage but spread them out. You need to spread them out to your blog posts, to your services page, or your Contact Us page because when people are linking from other sites, they’re not always referring to the home page.

If you get listed in your local business chamber or a local networking group, that’s a good back link to your business.  Another way of acquiring back links is what we call guest posting, so you outreach to people that own blogs or websites that are relevant to your niche and then you ask them how you can get back links from the website. Either in a form of article, or to be a sponsor of your website so forth and so on. That’s another good way of acquiring high authority back links.

Another way is by sponsoring a school, a charity or community organisations and asking them if they could put your logo on their website and that logo might link straight back to yours. For example, because .edu has a really high authority because it’s a trusted website and you can get a lot of SEO value.

If you are a lawyer or a chiro, who can write guest articles, ask them can you have a link back to that article on your website or think about what you can offer them at the end of the article, “Here’s my article, if you want 10 tips or a guide you can click and get the guide here and take them back to that.” So think about natural things that will actually work to do that.

 

Continue to add content

Google will come back and re-look at your website on a regular schedule and they will look at it less frequently if it’s not continually updated. So if your competition are updating their sites and you aren’t, Google will rank their website pages higher.

But where can you start with adding more content? Go back to your keyword planning and look at keywords/phrases you haven’t “mapped” yet and start with this.

Do you have a PDF on this topic? If so, update it and convert it to a webpage that give readers the option to download the PDF.

If you’ve done a Podcast, record a video or give a talk on the topic, get it transcribed and create another keyword optimised page on your website. This is often another easy way to increase the content without a lot of effort.

Just make sure you create your own content – don’t copy and paste someone else’s content aside from the obvious bad plagiarism as this duplicates content that will not get ranked by Google.

Not sure?

If you are confused about the best Search Marketing for your business:

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