Tips on Search Marketing

  • Organic search is becoming less important than paid search.
  • Consider the typical sales funnel of 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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