Is Your Search Marketing Strategy Responsive to Your Customers?
Hold on to your hat. Google received nearly 2.3 trillion searches in 2019. In fact, sixty-seven searches are performed on Google every second!
Organic and paid search clicks across search engines can easily supply more than half of your 
website traffic. Because of this, it’s important to truly understand how viewers to your site search for results and how to optimize your website based on what you discover after viewing website analytics.
Search marketing strategies are changing constantly, yet there are three core areas that continue to remain a foundation of the process:
- Content: Can we say this enough? We all struggle to find the time to carefully craft our messages. Yet taking the time to create high-quality, relevant content that offers the best answers for people seeking answers will drive the highest return on your investment of time. An average 300-word word count is best, as long as its solid copy and not just a webpage stuffed with fluffy content and random keywords. Make sure to develop section headings and relevant graphics to add interest to the copy. Don’t shy away from using bullet points if copy is very lengthy. The key is to keep the reader on the page and interested in what you have to say.
- Technical Development: From a technical development perspective, websites should be search engine friendly. Poor web practices will hurt your search rankings. Regularly review and correct problems such as broken outbound links, 404 errors, and HTML errors such as missing or duplicated meta tags. Also make sure your website is firing on all cylinders when it comes to mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets. Make certain your site loads quickly and renders well on all devices.
- Backlinks: An astonishing 55.24% of pages don’t have a single link leading back to it from other sites as reported by Impact. Backlinks are earned through strong content, active social sharing, email promotion, and PR. It’s actually a form of influencer marketing. The more trusted domains in your backlink profile, the higher your website ranks and the stronger it becomes.
Search is More Than Ranking High
The top three search results on the first page of Google are reported to get more than 50 percent of clicks. Source: CMSWire Yet more than a third (34 percent) of search on Google don’t result in a click at all, either because the results don’t match viewer expectations or Google provides the answer directly in a knowledge graph box.
Images receive 3 percent of all Google search clicks, and over 2 percent of clicks are directed to YouTube videos. In fact, YouTube “How To” Video Searches were up 70% with over 100 million hours watched in 2015 alone.
Search continues to grow on Mobile Devices and Responsive Reigns Supreme
It’s no surprise, 69% of all digital media time is now spent on mobile devices. Organic search visits on phones rose 15 percent for all search engines last year. Forty-three percent of organic searches were performed on phones and 10 percent on tablets. (Source: Marketing Scope)
In 2015, Google made a search engine algorithm change that we in the marketing industry called “Mobilegeddon”. Essentially, they insisted that all smartphones be user-friendly. If not, your brand would be losing out on valuable leads. This is the change that launched the birth of responsive website design. Because we’re Google Partners, we were given the “heads-up” on this change and, as a standard service, began to offer our clients this feature so websites would automatically adjust to any device being used, particularly on mobile devices.
Take a look at your website on a smart phone. Do you need to zoom in to read the text; or scroll back and forth to click on any items in your main menu? If so, your website is probably not responsive. At the very least it’s not too user friendly. To know for sure Google offers a tool that analyzes your site based on how their systems look at it here.
We Can’t Forget Search Advertising
Although Google owns about 70% of the search market arena, Bing’s LinkedIn Connection offers a healthy strategy giving businesses the opportunity to be seen across multiple marketing channels. Pay per click can be an excellent source of advertising as it can give you laser target precision on serving up ads directed just to your audience. Yet PPC will only work if you know what you’re doing. To avoid wasting valuable dollars, you need to carefully speak to the problems your products or services solve BEFORE developing any ads. A thorough review of your target audience is also required. Where are they located? What industries do they serve in? If you’re not familiar with the process, or delegate the task to someone with little time, you can easily end up paying for clicks from people who had no interest in your product or service.
Give Your Website the Attention it Deserves
Profitable results do not happen overnight. It’s a marathon…not a sprint. But it’s certainly worth it if done right. Campaigns need to be monitored and optimized regularly and patience is required. Every case is different, as are the businesses behind them. What worked in 2018 isn’t going to work as well in 2020. Changes continue to happen almost daily.
Search is a bit like herding bees. Yet it’s likely to remain among the top sources driving website traffic for quite some time. Beit organic or paid service, quality content will continue to be the essential core supported by strong “back-end” technology and careful attention to analytics.
Take a hard look at your current search strategies. It may be time for an update. Have you updated your campaigns recently or confused with all the changes in the digital world? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re happy to help answer any questions you may have.
Are Results Part of Your Marketing Plan?
We’re well into another year. And if you’re responsible in any way for marketing within your business, it’s the time to finally embrace today’s new marketing model as part of your plan. In order to properly capture data and protect one’s investment in marketing, a skillful blend of both digital and traditional marketing methods will be required.
It’s no surprise that the increase in new channels and technologies have dramatically changed marketing. Yet the speed in which this is taking place continues to increase. In order to keep up, companies now need to leverage the full scope of their marketing capabilities and analyze the results so that proper targets can be identified, the correct resources allocated, and marketing budgets are controlled. Without doing so, marketing efforts could generate nothing more than noise and expense rather than promotion and profits.
According to a Chief Marketer Poll, over half of marketers expect their budgets to increase in this new year, but many still don’t feel they are optimizing their marketing strategies…in particular, digital strategies. While Business to Business (B2B) brands tend to use metrics such as return on investment (ROI), Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers have traditionally used key performance indicators (KPI’s) to gauge the success of their marketing.
We consider the increase of digital strategies a blessing. It has clearly unveiled the importance of our mission as marketers: to build data for future sales and reduce wasted spend. Yet many companies continue to feel threatened by digital marketing strategies. This is to be expected. After all, it’s difficult to allocate internal resources with all the necessary skills required to keep up with the constant updates and new technologies evolving in marketing. Additionally, building a marketing structure in a way that interacts with other business functions, as well as traditional marketing elements, can be a real challenge due to the constant demands of daily business.
Today there are new competencies and capabilities required when marketing. Expertise such as data development and analytics, customer experience, content, multichannel and personalization are seldom properly understood, nor being met. Although we all acknowledge this change in the marketing industry, it’s been challenging for businesses to reflect this change within their company structure.
We invite you to embrace change and collaborate this year. Bring marketing to the table when identifying target markets. This will help ensure that the necessary competencies and capabilities are addressed in creating an efficient, effective plan for your marketing strategy. Help your team function within your company in an effort to improve how marketing works both within itself and with other business functions within the company. Don’t hesitate to contact us should you have questions. We’re here to help your company realize the full potential of your marketing.
Why Mobile Optimization is Critical
PEW research now reports a growing share of Americans now use smartphones as their primary means of online access at home. Today one-in-five American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have traditional home broadband service.
In addition, Deloitte’s recent mobile consumer survey proves how older Americans are catching up in terms of smartphone penetration in the US. Adults over the age of 55 are now the fastest-growing smartphone ownership group. Statistics have jumped from 67% in 2017 to 74% today.
The B2B customer journey is typically lengthy with a longer research phase. Information gathering takes place 24/7 and mobile optimized practices are necessary to improve customer communications and efficiently spread them across different channels such as a company’s website, landing pages, siru mobile casinos, emails and social media. Knowing your customer, and how they fit into your marketing and communications strategy will help improve conversions and enhance efficiency.
As you continue planning for your 2019 strategies, gather and analyze data from your current website and other digital products such as email and social media to determine who your customers are and what they are looking for. This will help you to determine what types of information they prefer to receive and how they prefer to receive it while guiding you to a better mobile sales journey for your customer.
The chart below demonstrates the dramatic change in mobile use demographics.
| Empty | Any Cellphone | Smartphone | Non- Smartphone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 95% | 77% | 17% |
| Men | 95% | 80% | 16% |
| Women | 94% | 75% | 19% |
| Ages 18-29 | 100% | 94% | 6% |
| 30-49 | 98% | 89% | 9% |
| 50-64 | 94% | 73% | 21% |
| 65+ | 85% | 46% | 40% |
| White | 94% | 77% | 17% |
| Black | 98% | 75% | 23% |
| Hispanic | 97% | 77% | 20% |
| Less than high school graduate | 90% | 57% | 33% |
| High school graduate | 92% | 69% | 24% |
| Some college | 96% | 80% | 16% |
| College graduate | 97% | 91% | 6% |
| Less than $30,000 | 92% | 67% | 25% |
| $30,000-$49,999 | 98% | 82% | 15% |
| $50,000-$74,999 | 98% | 83% | 15% |
| $75,000+ | 98% | 93% | 5% |
| Urban | 96% | 83% | 13% |
| Suburban | 94% | 78% | 16% |
| Rural | 91% | 65% | 26% |
Source: PEW RESEARCH CENTER Survey conducted Jan. 3-10, 2018.