Google likes to play with their search algorithms, which can make it difficult for marketers (and content creators, in particular) to keep up — much less excel — with their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns. But despite the challenge, smart marketers do their best to achieve great paid and organic rankings on Google search engine results pages (SERP) for a wide variety of root and long-tail keywords. And that’s because, according to Chitika, the first organic position on a SERP receives 33% of a given term’s traffic share and all entries on the first page of a SERP receive 92% of all traffic for that term.

Let’s focus on three simple strategies that are proven to yield SEM success.

Make Sure Your SEO Strategy Matches Your Target Audiences

Today, SEO should be an element of pretty much every digital marketing campaign you run. That’s because it’s a core component of lifecycle marketing and is meant to inform and support prospects and customers through every phase of the buyer’s journey. Better SEO means purposeful content that translates into more traffic, great leads, and improved engagement.

For example, quality SEO campaigns can help you:

  • Attract new prospects and enter them into your sales funnel
  • Position yourself as a trusted thought leader in your space
  • Provide informative content at each stage of the customer journey
  • Supplement your automated email drip campaigns
  • Compel unknown prospects to become known leads via content downloads
  • Inspire customer loyalty and encourage client advocacy
  • Develop sharable content that improves social media reach

Yet, while good SEO can improve and enhance basically every digital marketing tactic,  search engine marketing is rapidly pivoting to embrace more personalized content, which means it’s more important than ever to align your SEO strategy with your company’s business objectives. It’s not enough to rank well; you need to rank well for topics that directly address your target audience’s problems and help them overcome these issues. Of course, this means you have to understand who your target audiences are in the first place.

Developing awesome content is great, but you need to make absolutely sure that your efforts aren’t in vain. To develop content that gets results, you need to understand your buyer personas and the keywords those prospects are most interested in and then develop strategies, tactics, and content to meet those potential clients where they’re at online consistently.

Structure Your Webpages Properly to Allow Google to Crawl Them Easily and Accurately

Implementing quality on-page SEO best practices is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your search engine marketing campaigns and your organic rankings on Google’s SERPs. Minor changes can have a major and near-immediate impact. For best results, your content team should work closely with your webmaster when structuring and restructuring your webpages. This will ensure that you’re not sacrificing a quality user experience for improved SEO, as both are valuable components of a sound digital marketing strategy and effective customer journey.

We’ve already covered the importance of developing good and relevant content that is tailored to your target audiences, which is the most important element of quality on-page SEO, so now we’re going to look at some of the more overlooked or seemingly minor elements (that are actually crucial to improving your SEM).

  • Title Tag: Behind the actual content of your webpage, landing page, or blog, your title tag is your most important on-page SEO component. Therefore, you need to make sure that your title is compelling and includes your primary keyword to attach more weight to it. You can also add modifiers to your title to rank for long-tail keywords.
  • Meta-Description: The meta-description is the copy excerpt that shows up next to your entry on a SERP. So it’s important to describe your content in a way that is specific and concise to encourage users to click on your link. And to make it easier for Google to interpret the content, be sure to include your primary keyword in the meta-description.
  • URL: You webpage URL should be short, descriptive, and include your primary keyword (noticing a trend yet?). It should also reflect a clear hierarchy that makes the topic of the page clear to your users. Here’s an example of quality URL structure in action:
    https://goosedigital.com/platforms/act-on/

The focus narrows from left to right in the URL slug, and it includes optimal keywords that indicate to Google the relevance of the page based on specific search queries.

There’s so much more to on-page SEO than we can possibly cover in a single section of a single blog, but if you focus on implementing the best practices above in a considerate and meaningful way, you’ll be on the fast track to a much improved search engine marketing strategy. If this is too much information to remember, we recommend installing a plugin like Yoast that can provide suggestions for how to optimize your content for SEO.

Read the full post on our partner Act-On’s blog. Need help with SEO? Get a free assessment today:

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