Why SEO should be an integral part of marketing strategy, campaigns & measurement

I started writing about this whilst planning a podcast but 6 pages of notes later I realised it would be way too long - I guess I’m kind of passionate about this topic.

Just to be different, I’m going to start with measurement. And by referring to a Search Engine Land article I shared on here recently, entitled ‘Why search needs to be combined with awareness for maximum impact.’ Greg Sterling is the author. He says “As the customer journey becomes ever more circuitous and complex, marketers need to think and act holistically in their media planning and ROI/ROA analysis.”

Greg talks about how search is important for measuring brand and product awareness - helping to measure online campaigns but also the effectiveness of TV ads. He mentions Digiday reporting that direct to consumer brands are increasingly looking to search traffic to evaluate the performance of their TV campaigns. It’s a really good article and got me thinking about how ATL marketing drives traffic to websites e.g. some print media uses hashtags, sometimes radio will say to ‘Google X’ and every business card at networking events displays a website or at least a company name to Google. 

So, what is brand traffic and how do you measure it?

Of course, if you’ve sent a direct mail campaign for a brand new product out to a targeted group, with a specific discount code, measurement is easy, right? But what about the people who don’t use the card but still check you out online, purchasing at a later date without the code? Or the people who tell other people about something they’ve seen that might be good for them on your site, without even mentioning the code? 

• It’s not as simple as measuring promo codes. It’s not even as simple as measuring direct traffic. Think about people searching ‘Topshop jeans’ and coming up with paid and organic search engine results, before they even get to the Topshop website. 
• It’s not even as simple as measuring paid or organic traffic, not even with direct traffic thrown in. It’s measuring social mentions in relation to the campaign, referrals via links from websites talking about the campaign and even affiliate links where relevant. 

It’s a much wider picture. Measurement is all joined up and uses all of these channels even for a direct mail campaign, so shouldn’t your campaign be using them all too? 

Why brand traffic is important, but not everything

On a separate note, let’s talk about why just focusing on brand is bad.

Yes, brand traffic is important for measuring campaign traffic and ROI, but in the long term you want to be found by people who aren’t aware of brands or who simply don’t have the brand loyalty to care about going to you first. 

Think about when you first looked online for something you’d not searched for before. An example for me is hiking boots: I was aware of a few brands - The North Face in particular - but ended up going with a pair from a brand I had kind of heard of (I think) that had great reviews and an amazing product description. Obviously the user experience helped but what got me to the page and to buy the boots? The fact that I found these boots directly from Google search results.

So, how did they get there? The page and website were optimised really well. The words and images were directly relevant to what I had searched for (women’s hiking boots plantar fasciitis) and everything said about the boots made me think they were the best choice. Sounds simple really. 

On the flip side, I remember talking to the owner of an accountancy firm at a networking event when I was Head of SEO at a marketing agency. He was adamant his SEO was completely covered and the people he was paying to do it were doing a fantastic job, because when he searched for the name of his accountancy firm (from his own computer, where his browsers will probably know he wants to see this result first, after visiting the site many times) his firm came up at the top of the search results.

Of course, it’s important to rank for your own brand name, but what would be potentially far more valuable (and far more difficult) would be for his firm to be found for ‘accountants in X location’ or ‘accountants specialising in X service’.

Campaigns and strategy

Back to the Search Engine Land article. It quotes Chamber.Media’s Bryant Garvin’s presentation on ROAs and attribution from SMX Advanced, where he said “Data from any single channel may mislead or tell only part of the story. Marketers need to look at the ‘big picture’”.

If I think about campaigns I’ve done, I’ve used a mixture of search data and existing customer/client data to see who we need to target, when and what with - before embarking on a campaign. If you can get hold of more research than this, great - but in my opinion this should be the minimum.

I should say that when it comes to search data I don’t just mean insights from PPC either. It doesn’t tell you the whole picture from it’s reporting, because unlike organic results, if you’re not bidding on it you don’t have reports specifically about what people are searching for to land on your website. 

PPC should be using tools like Google Search Console to look at queries just as much as SEOs should be using AdWords Keyword Planner.

Anyway - I digress slightly. Basically, imagine you’re now at the point where you’ve ascertained demand using existing internal data and search data. For example, you’ve looked at historic customer/client demographics, what’s currently selling best due to trends or environmental issues etc. maybe you’re even used surveys, focus groups and reviews for more insight and then you’ve combined this with current search data from Search Console and Keyword Planner (or similar data from other tools). You’ve decided that there’s no point in calling your new cellulite smoothing underwear ‘Granny Pants’ because no-one is searching for this - even though it’s what everyone internally thinks this is what they should be called. A wise choice, unless of course your brand has the power to make ‘Granny Pants’ a thing that people search for, but that’s a whole other debate. The point is, now your strategy is in place, it’s time to create personalised content.

Create personalised content - nope, not ‘Hi Hannah’ in an email, I mean a bit more than that. 

Most of you will know that people consume content in different ways (blogs, newspapers, videos, social media, TV). You probably also know that in advertising there are ways to create lookalike audiences for social media advertising and emails, PPC broad match to catch even vaguely relevant users and remarketing to follow people around online, but for the purpose of getting to the point about using SEO for campaigns, I’m going to focus on personalised content for this channel. 

For SEO, consider:

• Which content is your main competition in this area - what is already ranking the highest and if yours isn’t better, start again.
• What content is being linked to most and gets most social shares?
• What relevant product or service from your campaign gets the most search demand (do you talk about the pink pants or the grey ones? Hopefully this has informed your campaign strategy from the start).
• Use Keyword Planner and Google Trends data to see historical data about which times of the year your product/service is most in demand/searched for e.g. at the height of or before summer for bikinis, BBQs and lawn mowers?
• Capitalise on peak trading/seasonality opportunities: which keywords should be used in your onsite content for SEO purposes and then amplified throughout your other channels? E.g. Black Friday beard trimmer sale.
• Is there a strategy you can use to get links to your content, which use your target term (ideally in the anchor text used for the link and in the topic of the content itself)? E.g. gamification using Russian Roulette; spin and land on a black for a free premium post-beard trim shampoo with every order on Black Friday.

The more of an authority you are, the more the right people will find you - whether they’re searching for your campaign’s product/service using your brand name or not.

A really good example of how using personalised content can work extremely well (albeit using very sophisticated methods) is with Netflix and Stranger Things. All credit for this information goes to Cassy Richardson, PPC & SEO Lead at Trivera - I stumbled across an article of hers that explained all about this on LinkedIn.

One of the cool stats from Cassy’s post is that Netflix’s Stranger Things series reached over 14m viewers within 1 week of its launch (according to a study by Symphony Technology Group). Netflix didn’t rely on a big marketing campaign to get to this point - it used its predictive analysis algorithms to show its users personalised content. But the really interesting bit? It used all of this data to create the content in the first place - so it knew it would be a hit without all the bells and whistles of multi-million pound marketing campaigns.

For most businesses, we don’t have such a captive audience to target. However if it was me, in a world where 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, I’d never create a piece of content (or a campaign) without using SEO data to help inform the strategy behind it.

My opinions

If you’ve enjoyed reading about my views about marketing and SEO, check out the podcast I co-host with Sarah McDowell, SEO Specialist at Likemind Media (the podcast is called SEO SAS and you should be able to find it on any platform). We’ll end up covering this article too, so if you fancy hearing more about it with Sarah’s expert opinions thrown in, hit subscribe ;)

Sources:

• Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/why-search-needs-to-be-combined-with-awareness-for-maximum-impact-318355
• Cassy Richardson: https://www.trivera.com/blog/what-can-marketers-learn-from-the-success-of-stranger-things
• For the 93% statistic, I found this on Junto.Digital and also SEO Tribunal.