Search Engine Marketing is an all-encompassing term that is all to do with directing traffic to your site from search results pages, either by using paid ads, or improving your position in the organic rankings.
Businesses are increasingly looking at how they can improve their performance in the organic listings by publishing articles and other informational content.
Building your online brand in this way, using techniques like content marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) can take a long time, but has several key benefits:
- Draw more traffic to your site – As you add more and more content to your site, you will find that you start to rank in search engines not only for your target phrases, but also for other words and phrases related to your articles. This increases the total number of times that you will appear in the search results, which ultimately leads to more people viewing your website.
- Establish your expertise – By writing high quality, original articles you can establish yourself or your company as a leader in your industry. This will make your site a really valuable resource for your customers and helps to build trust. Further down the line this increased trust will help to increase your conversion rate.
- Proactively address your customers’ questions – Producing articles for your site gives you the opportunity to answer some of the key questions that will run throufigh your customer’s mind before they make a purchase. This helps them to feel more confident about your products or services and therefore also drives up your conversion rate.
- Longevity – While traffic from paid search will stop as soon as you stop buying ads, search engine marketing can continue to bring organic traffic to your site long after you did the initial work. Investing in producing high quality content today, could potentially still rank really well in many years to come.
Search Engine Marketing Ranking Factors
To improve your performance in the search engine rankings, your primary focus has to be on producing really high-quality, naturally written, unique content that provides genuine value to your audience.
That being said, there is a wide range of SEO tactics that you should consider if you want to accelerate the time it takes to get to Google’s first page.
One of the most important things is to find keywords to focus your article on that will give you the best chance of ranking. Targeting phrases that are too competitive will make it very difficult to rank, meaning that you receive very little, if any, share of the search traffic.
Other things to keep in mind include:
- Is your target keyword in your URL?
- Is your target keyword in your main heading / title?
- Have you included relevant images and included the keyword in the file name, image title and alt text?
- Have you linked to relevant internal and external sites?
- How many other pages link back to your article?
Backlinks are one of the primary ranking factors that Google’s looks at, so you should make sure you spend sufficient time promoting your content to encourage people to link back to it.
With Content Marketing, Play the Long Game
Successful search engine marketing strategies can take a long time to implement, and you have to be willing to invest for a number of months before you really start seeing results.
Many companies fall into the trap of starting a blog, and then giving up on it when they don’t start to see the impact immediately. Blog writing can take up a lot of time and if you aren’t seeing results it can feel hard to justify the work. It is for this reason that more and more companies are outsourcing their content production using external copywriting services.
At AsOne we have experience with all aspects of search engine marketing and are well versed in the latest tips and tricks that will help to increase your position in the search ranking.
Our focus however is always on working with our clients to produce really great content that their audience will love, and that will keep driving traffic into their businesses for many years to come.
