Editorial Articles

Chris Whitelaw explains the continued significance of search

Let’s face it. Search marketing works. But as technology, social media and on/offline brand interaction becomes more complex, it’s no longer enough to simply pay for your ads, optimise your content and let the search engines do the work. Search marketing must remain at the core of any digital strategy in order to create a ‘symbiotic’ approach to acquisition, engagement and retention. But how do you continue to innovate with search in a world saturated by it?

First, don't get greedy. There’s no point trying to harness traffic which your sales team and website can’t process. The key is to get granular and identify the demographic with the biggest potential to spend money on your products. There’s no use trying to convert irrelevant hits to your site if you want to build a long-term customer base.

Second, pay out, don’t sell out. It would be easy to dismiss paid search as the poor man’s SEO. Why sweat blood over keyword densities and Pulitzer Prize-worthy meta-tags when you can just splash a bit of cash to bag visibility on the SERP?

But this isn’t about throwing money at Google to send traffic your way. Paid search is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to convert customer behaviour into revenue. With intelligent testing and careful modification over time, you can get to the meat of how customers behave on your site and generate quality leads.

Thirdly, organic is healthy. Effective natural search optimisation is hard to achieve. It’s a slow burner, but if you get it right, the payoff can be huge. Google is constantly innovating the way it ranks pages, and new developments have numbered the days of the keyword-drenched content farm article. Now it’s about creating compelling, engaging, shareable content that wins your customer’s (and Google’s) respect.

Fourthly, content. We keep banging on about it, but there’s a reason why. You’ve may have a meta-description that’ll have their finger trembling over the mouse, but poor content behind the SERP is the digital version of finding a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking. Content probably has a few seconds to convince the user to stick around, so if it doesn’t fulfil the promise from the SERP, it’s bye-bye customer conversions and hello soaring bounce rate.
Next, engage offline, bring online. Print is dead, right? Wrong. But the way in which offline and digital interact is changing. Offline media is a great way to gain brand visibility and can drive your brand searches through the roof. The popularity of applications like QR codes means you can hook the user right there and then. Give them consistent, targeted content and let your analytics do the rest.

Finally, if it works, you work. A high Google ranking cultivates trust but you need to innovate to stay top of the class. It’s no good luring customers to your site and then failing to deliver the goods, but unless you market effectively on and offline, you won’t be getting the traffic in the first place.

Chris Whitelaw
I Spy President & IPA Search Group Chairman
www.ispymarketing.com/