As a B2B or B2C marketer, one of the best ways you can support your company’s sales team and revenue targets is to become better at search engine marketing (SEM), which is sometimes referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). SEM/SEO is a great way to boost your marketing performance in the new year. Best of all, you can accomplish this at a relatively low cost when compared to other marketing tactics.
Many companies suffer from a lack of leads and revenue because they pay no attention to SEM. I’ve actually had a CEO of a potential client tell me that they had no desire for people to find their website since they had already identified the vast majority of their prospects and it was the job of the sales team, not the website, to turn these prospects into customers. While this company had been fairly successful with a purely sales-driven approach, I believe they would have benefited greatly from a strong web presence.
The primary goal of search engine marketing is to help your ideal prospects (current and future) find your website and the specific content they need to put you in the consideration category for the products and/or services you offer. Companies that show up at the top of the search engine results page on an organic (not paid) basis have a tremendous advantage over companies that are found deeper in the search results. Your results can be further accelerated if you have a strong conversion plan to turn visitors into opt-in responders. This will be the subject of future posts.
By the way, there is no better way to learn about search engine marketing than the Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz. To quote from the document: “We like to say, “Build for users, not for search engines.” There are three types of search queries people generally make:
• “Do” Transactional Queries: I want to do something, such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
• “Know” Informational Queries: I need information, such as the name of a band or the best restaurant in New York City.
• “Go” Navigation Queries: I want to go to a particular place on the Internet, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.
When visitors type a query into a search box and land on your site, will they be satisfied with what they find? This is the primary question that search engines try to answer billions of times each day. The search engines’ primary responsibility is to serve relevant results to their users. So ask yourself what your target customers are looking for and make sure your site delivers it to them.”
I would like to add two other types of queries that impact search traffic as well as leads and revenue. The first is the pain point. A user has a problem or issue and conducts a search to find the answer to his/her problem or issue – for example, “How do I recover my lost data?” The second is the validation query: “Is this product highly rated?”
Make search engine marketing one of your top priorities in 2016 and watch your marketing and sales results soar.
