Do more than boost awareness
In a digital, information-rich world, search is the key to every aspect of the purchase funnel. That means that it can have an major impact on business performance.
By applying a strategic and holistic approach to your strategy, search can help you dominate your business category and control the purchase funnel.
Impact business outcomes. Search should help to achieve your top-line organizational goals.
Drive growth. Search should be integral to marketing, sales and ultimately financial performance.
Prioritize monetization. Search projects and tasks should be prioritized based on the value and ROI they deliver.
How?
Use search to reach your prospects and customers at every stage of the customer journey.
Search is the gateway to your digital ecosystem. People trust Google to provide them with the best answers to their questions. Prospects and customers use search every step of the way on the path to purchase and throughout the customer experience. These micro-moments are the opportunity. This is where your brand can establish itself as the trusted, go-to resource, growing brand affinity within your industry.
A strong search strategy should help expand your digital footprint, improve brand visibility and increase marketing efficiency. This happens when your search strategy is aligned with your target audience’s demands at every stage. Through research, you can understand your audience’s search habits and identify who delivers the most value. Insights from research can identify content themes and terms your business can use to attract high-value searchers into your ecosystem.
Armed with the knowledge of how your audience searches, how they want to engage with brands and the kind of experience they expect upon arrival, your plan becomes strategic and holistic. You will know which search strategies should be deployed and in what stage of the customer journey to drive results. Every facet of your search strategy will be working together to activate branded searches where they deliver the most value and achieve specific, measurable conversions.
Build search into the DNA of your website.
Your website is the catalyst for search ROI; it is the digital destination of your brand. It begins with a plan that builds search into the DNA of your website. A critical success factor is how your website is designed and developed. This includes a multitude of on-page factors, content and technical optimizations that will help a search engine contextually understand your site. A search audit can be a first step to make your website more compatible for the search engines.
Website content is another critical success factor in driving search ROI. Surprisingly, only 45% of companies integrate content and search together. Your website content should have a laser focus on driving users to actions that impact business outcomes. Search insights should be infused into your content planning and development process. Search should fuel content ideation, help you get the most out of existing content longer-term, and increase website rankings.
When search is used to improve website and content performance, the combined result is a strategic user experience that drives growth.
Use search to amplify campaigns and improve social content.
Organic and paid search drive better results when they are integrated into one single strategy, one holistic program. Combining paid search and organic search efforts results in a 30% increase in organic traffic and a 25% increase in traffic from search engine marketing, according to a recent case study. A combined program will deliver efficiency, so you get more out of each paid media dollar. The resulting research and analysis from a synchronized search effort can also reveal emerging search trends across your industry, improving your social content.
Search can also positively impact results from performance marketing campaigns. Search insights reveal audience needs, pain points and how they search for solutions. These insights can be deployed in all elements of an integrated campaign – website landing pages, content, social, display, paid media and earned efforts – to drive conversions.
Use search to prioritize marketing efforts that deliver the greatest monetization.
Search is a constantly changing landscape. It’s not a box you can mark ‘complete.’ Businesses that desire a sustained outcome should prioritize the right mix of ongoing efforts to deliver the greatest ROI. This means investing in an ongoing search program. An ongoing search program monitors search performance against specific goals, tracks competitors to identify new opportunities and makes strategic recommendations to increase the revenue impact from search. All with the mindset of keeping you top-of-mind with prospects and customers across their path to purchase to grow market share and build brand affinity within your industry.
Search raises digital performance across your entire enterprise.
The complexity of search today requires a multidisciplinary team of experts to collaborate and integrate across UX, content, development, paid media and reporting. It touches how your business is found across all your digital channels, content, web properties and programs. By applying a strategic and holistic approach to search, you raise the performance of all digital competencies and move them forward together in one clear direction. It becomes the focal point in driving the trajectory of your business.
