Optimizing Your Marketing Efforts
The basics of SEO and moving past just focusing on SEM
A great PPC strategy can make a lot of money, but there is only so much SEM can do for your business. In order to maximize profits, make sure your landing page is optimized for the best conversion rate. You can also work on search engine optimization to raise your ranking on Google’s organic search results.
SEO is often referred to as “black magic” but there are actually quite a few common practices you can take advantage of to increase your ROI with organic results. In addition to ad rank, SEO encapsulates the effort you make to target people in the higher funnel of your customer journey. By “higher funnel,” we mean people who are just asking questions about your product whereas “lower funnel” would be those who are ready to buy. You need to target the whole funnel and have an optimized landing page to fully capture your desired audience.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can bring your ranking up, increase traffic, bring down your costs, and ultimately get you a profitable conversion rate. One easy way to get started with CRO is split testing the landing pages your traffic is being directed towards. After a few weeks, pick out the pages that have better conversion rates. You can now continue to split test but only make one small change at a time. Examples of small changes include making the lead form easier to fill out, removing or adding certain buttons, changing the phrases you use, and moving things to be above or below the fold of the page. If you are requesting customer information, make it clear to them that their information will be private with a phrase like “We promise to never share your data” located right by the “complete form” button. Small blocks of text with legal jargon look untrustworthy, so we recommend moving that to a less prominent space.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has a lot more moving parts and is therefore more difficult to monitor. Arguably the two most frequent suggestions for SEO is re-writing Meta descriptions (the little descriptions in the organic results of Google), and getting backlinks from authoritative sights in your industry. Meta description re-writing is pretty straightforward but can be very tedious for sites with millions of product pages. In the long run, a better meta-description gets you a lower bounce rate, more clicks, and a higher Google rank.
Backlinks, on the other hand, are a bit harder to come by. You need to start building relationships with industry veterans, bloggers, and any other authoritative figures in your industry by asking them to post a link to your site on theirs. Sometimes, you will need to have them use your product and it can take months or even years for a solid connection to emerge but it is worth it in the end. You can also target forums like Reddit or Quora, places where your customer journey begins. For example, if you sell natural flu remedies, you might want to represent your brand on forums where people are asking about the best natural flu remedy available. Placing your brand in the right places, such as comment sections and Q/A websites, allows you to target your higher funnel.
Finally, produce relevant content on a consistent basis to help your SEO efforts. Google ranks new content that’s posted often very highly, giving you another opportunity to target your higher funnel. A blog about natural remedies located on the same site as your product can quickly become a one-stop shop for potential and current customers.
