The battle for revenue online centers largely on search.
Search is more than keywords. It is an entire environment that must be focused, balanced, and managed.
Focus
What do your customers want? What does Google want? Answering these questions – and then adjusting your content to meet these needs – is where increased revenue comes from.
The good news is, Google wants what your customers want, and Google wants to help you give your customers what they want. There are now plenty of cloud-based tools, including those offered by Google, that help you find out what customers want when they go looking for the kinds of things you sell. It’s seldom – or never – what you assume. We think like sellers, they think like buyers. We come up with phrases that make sense to us, they come up with phrases that make sense to them.
This is the gap you must cross, or you will never be competitive in search. Fortunately tools such as SpyFu, Moz, and Google Search Console can help you hone in on the phrases that your customers are using to try and find you.
Balance
Analyzing the digital leaders in about 30 industries has made one thing abundantly clear to us: when search engine optimization is done right, there are six critical components involved. We like to think of them as “plates spinning,” because they all have to be optimized or the whole thing comes crashing to the floor. The six elements are:
Customers – obvious. If you can’t be relevant to them, you won’t be found, and they won’t buy from you. They know what they want, they know how they want to be treated when they come to your site, and they will only reward you with revenue when you meet their expectations.
Search – again, obvious. Google still accounts for 80% of all searches, so pleasing Google is very important.
Paid Search – can be more effective than people assume, although it takes serious research and constant testing to make it work. Fortunately, you can now see exactly what your competitors are doing, and imitate their success from the start – you don’t have to reinvent the wheel – but you can never afford to “set it and forget it.”
Conversion – measuring the success of your search effort means tying search to revenue, not just clicks. Yes, “conversion” can mean “downloading a while paper” but the process shouldn’t stop there. It should tie directly into your nurturing, selling, and closing efforts, so that no action on the part of your customer is ever thrown away. Revenue-based metrics are the backbone of managing your search effort.
Competition – how do you compare? What are they doing that you’re not? What can you learn from them – and imitate? What does their content look like? What are they doing consistently, that pleases both customers and Google? Have they made any changes lately that took them up to a new level?
Technology – the first place to start making improvements. You can have the best content in your industry, but if your site is slow, Google’s going to notice – and rank you less favorably. Your customers will notice, too. It’s easier to click away than wait for a site to load. And if you’re not mobile-ready, forget it. More than half of all searches are done on mobile devices now, by intense, determined-to-buy-now customers. If your competitors are more mobile-ready than you are, they will rank more highly than you when the mobile customer goes searching.
Management
Management of your search effort, involving these six elements, should not be left to your technical staff. We’re sure they’re good at what they do, and we have always been impressed with the web and search teams that we find inside companies, but all successful business efforts still need business management.
The goals of the company need to be tied to all search and content marketing efforts, or you will end up doing a lot of work for nothing. All the wheels will be in motion, but the machine will never get any traction, and you will fall further and further behind your more focused and balanced competitors.
This is truly the most common situation we find, even though the companies we help are all run by dedicated and intelligent managers. In the last few years, technology-driven marketing has gotten so complex and so specialized that business managers have thrown up their hands and just left it to the specialists.
But those specialists need direction. They need leadership. As Peter Drucker once said, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
There is a right way to do search, one that is fully integrated with customer expectations, Google’s expectations, and the company’s revenue goals.