Let’s Get Visible looks at the importance of upskilling to develop a broad marketing strategy across all channels. From traditional marketing strategies to combining your PR, Social Media, and SEO campaigns to gain the best traction. PLUS: Understanding the jargon.
The marketing minefield has certainly shifted dramatically over the past decade. With the rise in social media and website content, many of the traditional forms of marketing have been left in the wind.
Let’s be honest, everyone wants to be right at the top on their search engine page. This is commonly referred to as SERP or Search Engine Results Page and you’ll find this is normally a mix of paid advertising (right up the top) and organic results (down the bottom). A good combination of marketing skills will improve your website’s SERP and visibility when it comes to search engines.
So what is the best way to combine your marketing tactics for your brand to keep on top of your game, get better brand awareness, and improve your website’s SERP?
Understanding SEA & SEO
SEA or Search Engine Advertising is just that – paid advertising on platforms such as Google. It’s also commonly known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising. It’s easy to notice these advertisements on Google as they will contain a small box at the top of the listing with the symbol ‘ad’ and will appear before the organic search results.
SEA is wonderful for quick and seamless results. The only main issue is that once you turn off the advertising or the campaign comes to an end, these results can stop immediately. Meaning your listing can completely disappear into the endless pages below. Typically the cost per click also increases. This can be mainly due to your competitors utilising the same keywords so the bidding war begins and costs will rise.
The great news is, however, when you combine your SEA alongside other marketing, it can really pack a punch and make a big difference to your marketing campaign.
So let’s talk about SEO.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the method to improve the quantity of traffic to a website from search engines. It’s designed to ensure that the search engine allows the user to gain access to the most beneficial content from their initial searched keyword or phrase. The key to great SEO is to ensure that the search engines can analyse that you produce good content, have relevant keywords, meta descriptions, headlines, and URLs. It’s all about improving the user’s experience of finding information through their chosen search engine. SEO results can be slower than SEA results – however, the effects are lasting and cost nothing to employ or change.
Combining SEO and SEA is a great way to get the best out of your marketing goals. They both work well together and with the right analysing practices you can assess which keywords and content are working best, and utilise these in your ads or vice versa. Working in sync they can give you a great insight into what is working, and most importantly what is not.
SEA can quickly assess what keywords are driving clicks to your website, allowing you to refine your SEO for your marketplace. As such, SEO really focuses on providing the most relevant content and experience to the public. SEA can also benefit hugely from this knowledge as they can then direct their advertising to relevant content and pages. Give the user – your possible new client or customer – the best experience possible when browsing your website. This practice can increase users on your website, and ultimately sales.
Get the Jargon
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SEA – Search Engine Advertising
SERP – Search Engine Results Page
DA – Domain Authority
PR – Public Relations
SMM – Social Media Marketing
Backlink – URL link to relatable content
Backlinks & Blogs
Great content creates users. It is vital that your content is fresh, unique, and more importantly interesting. The internet is inundated with fake news and clickbait in an attempt to drive traffic to poor websites (and thus increasing their SERP).
However, this will only generate users who will quickly click off your page and ruin your brand reputation. Developing great content will improve your authority within your industry as a top source of relevant and educational information. SEO can be a great tool to investigate the keywords of what people are currently searching for and develop content around these words. Researching what topics are currently trending is also a great way to develop content that readers are wanting to know about. Adding relevant SEO keywords to your blogs and content is a great way to boost your site’s visibility when it comes to searches.
Once you have a good selection of blogs, backlinks can become vital to increase your authority. Working alongside partners to share backlinks is a good way to get started. With all backlinks quality over quantity is important. Checking Domain Authorities (DA) and ensuring you are linking with good ranking websites. Creating relationships with other websites for content (or content swapping) is also a good way to generate backlinks from trusted, well-ranking websites.
Public Relations
Public Relations or PR is all about brand awareness and sending a message to the public about your brand. Increasing your authority within your industry and educating the general public about who you are, what you do, and why you are the best. SEO and SEA can also help understand your target market and allow you to create media around these trending topics within your industry. Knowing what people are searching for when they find you can help you create content around these topics. In return, popular and successful PR campaigns can also drive additional SEO keywords.
Press Releases typically do not generate many backlinks, particularly from major media outlets. However, adding the links into your press releases on your websites, from news outlets that used your work, can help with SEO. Remember that your goal is to get the media outlet to write their own story about you, take a few of your quotes, and hopefully add in a backlink to your website or additional information on the topic you are presenting.
Also, don’t be afraid to track the media outlet and ask the question if they can add in a backlink. Likewise consider the other content on your website. If sending out a press release, ensure you add links from your website to other articles, case studies, infographics, etc that may attract further information sources and increase your chances of the media outlet adding in a trusted backlink to your website.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing or SMM is an important aspect of any business. Combining all of this alongside your social media campaign is also a wonderful way to ensure you are getting the most out of your marketing.
Sharing content with relevant links can help get the page ranking faster while also promoting your unique content and helping with brand trust and awareness. This can also benefit your SEO massively as you can dig deep into insights, user comments, and engagement. It can allow you to see first-hand the issues that products/services are receiving that you can rectify quickly.
Plus – SEO can benefit hugely as your SMM team can easily monitor the trending topics and keywords that are being used across all platforms. Allowing SEO specialists to ensure these keywords are listed on your website, while also generating content for your creative team.
SEO is also able to share the keywords allowing the SMM team to generate hashtags, posts, and content that contain these important keywords. Working together seamlessly and ensuring everyone is on the same page – or word to speak of!
By combining all of your marketing campaigns and encouraging keyword sharing, knowledge, and analytics you can ensure your brand is best represented and all areas. Working in synergy to give you the best results possible and increase your overall SERP.