Tips on Search Marketing

Organic search is becoming less important than paid search.

Consider the typical sales funnel:

awareness > research > consideration > decision

  • Search works best in the research phase, it’s not good at awareness

SEO advantages

  • No incremental cost to traffic
  • People click on them more
  • Once you reach ranking you don’t have to do much to maintain it

SEO disadvantages

  • Less control over timing & landing page experience
  • Can be difficult to rank for a broad range of categories

Content is what ultimately matters in SEO, but if you are perceived not to have authority, great content won’t matter much

  • Content is crawl able so search engines like it
  • Internal linking reinforces what’s important on a site
  • To rank for a certain search term, it is best to have a single page focused on this topic
  • Title tag, heading, URL, etc. helps Google determine if the page is relevant to a search query. This is basic and should be done well. Keyword metatag doesn’t matter- Google doesn’t look at it so don’t bother. The description tag is often times used as the accompanying description text to each search result

About authority

  • Search engines use external links and mentions as the primary measure of a site’s authority
  • Links from other authoritative sites matter most
  • Social buzz counts for a lot too

Search advertising advantages

  • More control
  • Immediate results
  • Ability to test

Search advertising disadvantages

  • Incremental cost of traffic- in the long run, traffic costs more than SEO
  • Ongoing effort

Improvement cycle

Add keywords & ads > test & optimize > measure results > repeat

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