by Browsermedia

Having completed your research, you will now be armed with invaluable information about what your audience is looking for. Effective research is like having a global focus group and you must take note of what your (potential) customers are telling you and take action to meet these demands accordingly.

Having completed your research, you will now be armed with invaluable information about what your audience is looking for. Effective research is like having a global focus group and you must take note of what your (potential) customers are telling you and take action to meet these demands accordingly.

Your team

Before you embark upon a search marketing campaign, first make sure your internal house is in order. If you are a large company, make sure there is collaboration between the relevant departments such as Marketing and IT. If you have affiliates, you need to sit down with them and decide upon guidelines for keyword bidding or a strategy for using the affiliates tactically.

For smaller companies, one member of staff could be trained up to manage your search campaigns and partners in house. The skills required for SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay per click) are fairly unique so a company will need to recruit accordingly or work with an agency. Ultimately, whether it is an individual, a small in-house team or an agency, search engine marketing should be considered part of the overall marketing mix and not treated as a stand-alone department of a business.

Timings

It is important to appreciate that although search marketing can provide quick results, not all objectives can be achieved overnight. For example, achieving a top position in the natural listings can take up to 6 months. Assign realistic timings to your objectives by doing some initial testing or working with an agency to work out your strategy. A specialist agency can also advise on how to integrate your search campaigns with offline activity and on consumer trends in search that may influence your success.

Your website

Perhaps the most important consideration is the structure of your website. Does anything need to be altered or added to fit in with your search campaign to ensure a seamless customer journey?

‘Information architecture (IA)’ is a term used to describe the organisation of information, the content, functionality, navigation and usability of a web site. Successful IA will ensure that users can easily find the information that they are looking for and help the search engines ‘understand’ your site.

Consider the range of information being sought and plan your website so that content can be grouped into logical ‘themed’ sections. Ensure that your internal linking allows users to easily navigate between the different areas on your site without getting lost. This also helps make the site ‘search engine friendly’ (see Chapter 5)

When using PPC, ensure that you create suitable landing pages. If they are looking to buy pink socks or to find out your share price, abandoning them on the homepage rather than directing them straight to the relevant page will just frustrate your potential consumer. By successfully marrying search terms, ad copy and an appropriate landing page, you can create a seamless ‘journey’ for the user which will help drive conversion. If you are aiming to drive sales, it is no good driving traffic through search if they do not go on to convert so make sure these landing pages have prominent calls to action.

Online media offers you an unparalleled ability to analyse how users are interacting with your site. There are many solutions available to monitor site usage, but at the very least ensure that you know where your users are coming from, what search terms they used and what they do on your site. It is important that once you have set your KPIs you put in place a tracking system to help monitor them, whether it is your basic site statistics, or third party web analytics. (More details in the next chapter)

Copywriting

Achieving a listing in the search engine results, in either paid or natural, is one thing, but getting the user to click-through to your site is another. The headline and accompanying copy to your listing is an important call to action and there are a number of things to bear in mind when preparing the copy:

• Think about what they are looking for and use keywords in the title and description field (this is more important than your company name)
• Use the description to provide a concise summary of what the page will offer the user and give the user a reason to click through (e.g. highlight any promos or special benefits)
• Be honest and factual and back up any claims on your site
• Be specific about the products on offer to avoid false clicks (e.g. b2b companies need to make it clear that their offers are open to businesses only)