SEO Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The role of the SEO strategy

SEO is quite a wide-ranging discipline, and it can achieve a lot of different business objectives.

When executed correctly, it can be a major driver of cost-effective traffic since it involves preparing your website for optimal performance with search engines and customers. We don't pay for the clicks, of course. So, if you're thinking long term, this can be a real driver for your business.

It makes sense that SEO should be able to perform any of these areas of attracting, converting, or retaining customers because it encompasses every aspect of your website. So, through data analysis, you can understand the purpose of each aspect of your website and assess which areas are underperforming or potentially overperforming. You can then attribute all activities in your plan to the objectives of either attracting, converting, or retaining customers.

Crawling the URLs

An effective way of doing this is to crawl all the URLs within your website use Google Analytics or Screaming Frog, for example. Find out which URLs are really bringing in the high-volume traffic for you. And then, understand the intent of that traffic and understand the page itself. Is it built for attracting, converting, or retaining? If you know that from the outset, you'll be able to strategize much better down the line.

How SEO attracts, converts, and retains customers

It's important to understand how SEO contributes to those three key areas of attracting, converting, and retaining customers.

On-page content

SEO can be applied to an analysis of your on-page content, for example. This is a multifaceted discipline, and spans everything from creative to interactive campaigns through to the design of your purchase confirmation pages. You should know the purpose of all those pages before you start setting targets. It doesn't make sense to have an acquisition page that's purely focused on volume. You will need know the conversion rates that you are getting once user data comes through to the site.

Creative content campaigns

Creative content campaigns can engage the audience and attract backlinks. It is important to understand how this fits in with the needs of your audience, however. It could be an easy catch-all term that content is king, and we therefore need to build more content. But if your industry isn't one where people are looking for creative assets and you're not a destination site for information, people come to you because they already know they want to purchase. In other words, there is no need to go creating content assets purely for the sake of it. You should really think about the purpose of the content you're creating.

Email marketing campaigns

Finally, consider how the content that we create as SEO strategists can also be used for email marketing campaigns. It doesn't just have to be what goes on the website. A lot of what we create can be re-purposed and used for completely different ways. It could be Gmail-sponsored posts, or it could just be classic email marketing campaigns.

How search is evolving

There is clearly crossover between SEO and the areas that we wouldn't traditionally have thought that it would cross into, And, as we’ve already noted, the search marketing landscape changes quite frequently. And that evolving nature continues to bring opportunities for digital marketers towards the goal of providing the best possible results across demographics, locations, and devices.

Demographics

There's already a lot of information out there about demographics, and we gain insights from paid search strategists that we work to break people down into demographic groups. We can then map that against some of our landing pages, and tailor the content accordingly. If we know who these demographics are, and we know what they're looking for and some of their past behavior, it’s more likely that we can shape our content to ensure they take the actions that we want.

Locations

Location targeting–or hyperlocal targeting as it is becoming known as Google gets much, much more granular with it–is now essential. This means that with paid search, we can really go after some of those local queries, and with SEO we just need to make sure our local properties are optimized to the best of our ability. That will increase the likelihood users will be served our results first when they conduct a search in our vicinity.

Devices

Similarly, the rise of mobile has meant the evolution of on-the-go search. User journeys occur across multiple devices, and that's something we need to bear in mind for all of the channels when we're looking at strategy.

But one thing we should steer clear of is viewing mobile users as merely mini-desktop users. It really doesn't work that way and you'll notice it when you dig into the data. People basically behave differently across different devices. They will be searching for different things, so you should tailor your content based on that fact. But also bear in mind the frantic nature of mobile search versus desktop. Desktop is more considered, and it can be used more as a branding tool. But mobile is about micro-moments. It's about capturing attention. You don't have the time to really tell your story in the same detail you might on desktop. This is a strategic thought that we should have when we are looking at all channels.

Search is more than search engines

When we look at new technologies, we're obviously looking at how we can make the most of them for our businesses. One recent trend that will affect things for the next few years is voice search. At this point it’s important to understand that SEO is not limited to traditional search engines. SEO also incorporates voice search, vertical search, and visual search.

Voice search

The first thing to consider here is whether this is very relevant to your brand. It's not used yet for acquisition purposes, necessarily, and tends to be informational. But there are a lot of considerations here as we see the number of voice searches continuing to increase.

Search query trends are in fact changing quite a lot because the way that we search on desktop or mobile is quite deeply engrained. We have a way of doing things. There's a certain language to it. We search for terms like credit cards and not necessarily which is the best credit card for me, which would be more natural language. But what we see with voice search is that people are speaking in much more natural language because they're expecting the results to be different.

This change in search query trends means several things. It means informational queries increase. It means that you must have the one correct answer, and that you're being served up for that query. But it also means that we get a lot more information from the user. If we're looking at a term like credit cards, it's hard to infer exactly what that person is looking for. We can't necessarily infer intent. But if that becomes a longer voice search query, something like which credit card is best for low credit, then there's a lot more information. We can do a lot more with that and create a lot more content around that. There are a lot of different ways of thinking about this. It's not just that there are opportunities to rank. There are opportunities to serve better content as well.

Voice search in action

Voice search is integrated with a lot of third-party tools and software, and it’s worth thinking about the knock-on effect of this. Consider how the Amazon Echo defaults to Bing for its search results. So, if people start using Amazon Echo a lot more, which seems likely, a lot more searches will default to Bing. And the obvious lesson here is that if you're not thinking about Bing as part of your search strategy, you could be missing out.

There are further integrations that are going on that are quite interesting. There may also be more integrations to come that will impact ecommerce, and again the Amazon Echo and its link to Amazon itself seems a logical player in this regard. But there will inevitably be many more opportunities for digital marketers to leverage in SEO strategy, and it is important to keep an eye out for some of these integrations because voice search will not be the only innovative search solution

The more we know about people, and the more we know about what they want and where they are, the greater the accuracy we have when targeting them and tailoring messaging for them. A good example here is Google Home and Google Assistant, which is a software that tries to integrate all these concepts. If you combine hardware in different locations with software that is ubiquitous, you can really start to be hyperlocal in your targeting. Now that will probably bleed more into the paid area than the organic area, but if may still be very relevant for your business in the future.

Example: L’Oreal

Since there is typically only one result in response to a voice search query, L’Oreal changed the focus of its keyword strategy to identify ‘striking distance’ keywords that it could move into the top position of the search results page. These are typically keywords that rank in the top 10 positions, that could be improved in the short-term. This has become the cornerstone of L’Oreal’s content strategy, and has helped them position for the voice search future.