Here Comes New Ideas For Capturing Traffic With Search Marketing.
Life in the digital age is all about capturing traffic. From Facebook to Twitter, we are constantly competing for our slice of this pie. The internet is a popularity contest and you’re either winning or losing! That’s why it pays off to understand how Search Marketing works so that you can stay ahead of the competition when it comes to generating more traffic. In this blog post, I want to talk about SEO.
By now, you should know that it isn’t wise to underestimate your competitors or their marketing tactics. If you haven’t started improving your organic search strategy, it’s time to catch up.
Here are 8 ways you can start grabbing more traffic from search results:
1. Know the Three Key Players in Search Marketing
The three key players in search marketing are the searcher (consumer), the search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and the website owner (you). When you’re thinking about designing your search engine optimisation strategy, it is essential to understand the needs of searchers and what search engines are looking for.
2. Knowing what search engines want
Searchers want relevant search results; they also expect websites to load quickly. Search engines, on the other hand, are looking for websites that will provide them with high-quality links that contribute to their ranking algorithm.
3. Understanding searchers’ needs
When you’re optimising your website for organic rankings, it is essential to understand what your target audience is searching for. What keywords do they use and how often do they search them? How long do they spend on certain websites and what types of websites are their favourites?
4. Targeting Search Queries
Search queries are specific searches typed into a search engine by searchers. Keyword research tools such as Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest can help you find out what phrases people use to search for your products or services.
5. Defining a Search Query
A search query is the text searched by a user on Google or another search engine. It consists of two parts: the keywords (usually words) made up of two or more words and the modifiers (usually phrases) that help narrow down your results.
Searchers want relevant search results; they also expect websites to load quickly. Search engines, on the other hand, are looking for websites that will provide them with high-quality links that contribute to their ranking algorithm.
6. Choosing the right queries to target
It is important to understand that keywords are not just single words. In fact, many single-word keywords have very high monthly searches, but also a very low click through rate (CTR) — the rate at which users who see search ads actually click on them. It’s important to match your ad with a keyword or a phrase that has a good search volume and CTR.
7. Satisfying searchers
When it comes to satisfying your target audiences, you have two options: you can either satisfy them by providing them with what they are searching for or you can surprise them by offering something they never knew about. In both cases, the outcome is positive — satisfied customers buy products and visit your website often, while surprised customers will share their experience with friends on social media or websites like Facebook or Google+. Here are ways to optimise your assets for specific channel.
8. Optimising Your Assets for Specific Channels
For each channel you are active on (SEO, PPC, email marketing), be aware of its features and assets; understand what type of content is expected and what you need to do in order to achieve success. For example, for each website you own, you could consider adding authorship markup to show Google your name exactly the way it appears on your Google+ profile. This will help improve your rankings within search results by providing relevant information about yourself, which is what search engines are looking for.
Optimising for Google
When it comes to SEO, many webmasters think they should focus entirely on keywords and content — get the former right and let Google do the rest of the work. In reality, being successful in SEO requires much more than just mastering a set of tools or techniques; you need to have a solid understanding of how search engines actually work.
Optimising for YouTube
Optimising videos for YouTube is more than just adding some tags and letting Google find your content automatically. You need to understand that this channel has its own unique features — you need to learn how to use them in order to achieve success, even if you’re promoting content on other channels at the same time.
Optimising for Pinterest
Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms, which means that users spend a lot of time on this website — they browse through more than 100 million images every day and more than 60% of them pin something to one or several boards. In order to succeed on Pinterest, you need to create good-looking boards and pin images that are relevant to your audience.
Optimising for Amazon
When it comes to sales, Amazon is a leading online marketplace that features millions of products from other sellers as well as its own inventory. In the past few years, Amazon has been expanding its services by creating new channels like the aforementioned Amazon Publishing, but also devices (the Kindle e-reader), software (Amazon Web Services — a cloud computing solution) and video content.
Optimising for iTunes
iTunes is an online marketplace where you can buy, sell and download music, books, TV shows and more. What’s interesting about iTunes is that it also enables you to publish your own content — you are not required to have a big budget or any specific experience in publishing.
Optimising for review sites
Reviews are an important part of the consumers’ decision making process; around 65% of US consumers usually read reviews before buying anything online. When it comes to product reviews, Amazon is by far the most popular platform (it accounts for more than half of all product reviews), but there are other websites that offer this type of content as well — Yelp, App Store, TripAdvisor and many more.
Optimising for search engine robots
Search engines use different types of crawlers to discover, read and index websites — this is what enables them to find your content and display it within search results. Google’s crawler is called Googlebot (this name appears in your Robots.txt file), while Bing uses several crawlers (Bingbot is the most popular).
How to achieve success with search engine marketing
There’s no question that search engine marketing can be very effective if done right; in fact, many people claim it is an essential part of any online marketing strategy. While this might be true for some companies (especially large ones), there are many others that could achieve better results by focusing on other channels such as social media or email marketing.
Taking this into consideration, the most important thing you should remember when it comes to search engine marketing is to target the right keywords and create useful content for your audience; make sure your content offers value and you will see the difference in time.
Earn Links: The Circle of Trust
There are four steps to earn links, which is known as the “circle of trust” model. First, cross-link your content within your own website; next, study your competitors’ links; third, create generous content; and finally, create content that is worthy of earning links..
1. Cross-link your content
The first step of the “circle of trust” model is to cross-link your content across different pages and even other websites if possible; this helps search engines understand that you are the owner of all the content, which results in more traffic and higher rankings.
2. Study your competitors’ links
The second step is to study your competitors’ links — it’s important to visit the pages where they are getting referrals from, as well as the content that refers traffic to them. If you notice a pattern, try implementing those techniques on your own websites and see if this improves results.
3. Create generous content
Generous content is content that offers value for free. A great example of this are infographics, which are not only popular among marketers — they are also very easy to promote since most people love sharing visual content on social media.
4. Create content that is worthy of earning links
The last step of the four-step process is to create content that is worthy of earning links; this means that you should avoid focusing on promotional tactics and instead, offer something valuable to your audience. This could be information that is not available anywhere else, tools and resources, or industry reports.
But don’t stop there, go further..
5. Publish primary research
In order to get people talking about your brand, it’s important that you publish primary research from time to time. This could be a survey, a study or even a simple infographic — anything that adds value to your target audience and gets people excited.
6. Keep up with the news
Finally, keep up with the latest news in your industry by reading blogs, joining group discussions and sharing the results with your own audience. It’s crucial to show that you are engaged with the community in order to get noticed.
Why do search engines like links?
Not only is link building a good way of earning natural backlinks and improving rankings (especially when it comes to Google), but getting links is also an excellent way of acquiring
That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please subscribe to my blog and get updates when I publish new content like this one.
