A Guest Post by Brad Shorr
There’s a big misconception that SEO somehow is at odds with a traditional marketing campaign — that incorporating SEO keywords and content in a website will create a negative impression, prevent conversions, and damage the brand. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. A solid SEO strategy can be woven into any traditional marketing campaign to make it reach more people and achieve better results. Here’s a look at how it is done.
THE IMPORTANCE OF KEYWORDS GOES WAY BEYOND SEO
All SEO campaigns worthy of the name start by identifying strategically important keywords — that is, the phrases people use on Google when they are searching for the things you sell. Keyword research gives you tremendous insights on items that are crucial for any marketing content you produce — be it website pages, social media posts, email blasts, brochures, or press releases. These insights include:
- The most common phrases people use to describe your products/services.
- The overall number of people searching for various products/services.
- The regional number of people searching for various products/services.
- The flipside: What phrases people do not use to describe your products/services, where your products/services are not widely searched.
These SEO keyword insights improve your marketing content all the way around. In addition, make content more consistent across all campaigns. Here are three of the most important ways keyword research improves what you’re doing:
- Describing your products with popular terminology allows prospects to immediately connect with you and understand what you’re selling.
- If there are different sorts of terms used for your products in different regions of the country, you can adjust the wording of your emails and other geographically targeted campaigns to create a strong connection with the local audience.
- Keyword insights will help you identify geographic markets where interest is high, and avoid markets where it is weak — facilitating a much better allocation of your marketing dollars.
SEO LINK STRATEGY ATTRACTS ATTENTION — AND ORDERS
An SEO strategy identifies certain pages of the website as being high priority — that is, pages you want a lot of people using Google Search to find, and find interesting. In addition to the home page, these target pages are usually product or service pages that are highly popular, highly profitable — or both.
An SEO campaign follows industry best practices in making every attempt to include links to target pages in content published outside your website. Google “bots” see these links, and in doing so, raise the organic ranking of those target pages. As rankings improve, more Google users see these target pages in search results and click-through — resulting in more qualified prospects coming to your website to evaluate your most important products.
These strategic SEO pages can also be linked in non-SEO marketing content such as press releases, email blasts, social media posts, articles published on industry websites, display advertising, digital sales collateral, and even printed marketing materials. The links themselves build the rankings of your most important pages and — very significantly — draw in new, interested website visitors who read your press releases, social media posts, emails, etc. By focusing on all campaigns in this way, you’re likely to see the best return for investment in your overall marketing efforts.
SEO HELPS YOUR MARKETING STAY ON THE SAME PAGE(S)
SEO keyword analysis and linking strategy help companies focus on selling more of the products and services they most want to sell. Of course it’s not necessary for all of your marketing campaigns to promote and prioritize the same items, but it certainly helps when marketing budgets are stretched to the limit, and when brand recognition is an important factor.
For entrepreneurial companies, both of these issues tend to hold true: There are never enough marketing dollars to go around, and a lack of brand recognition makes the process of closing a sale all the more difficult.
A common marketing mistake for entrepreneurs is to market too many things in too many ways. What usually happens is marketing campaigns far too diluted to make a solid impression! SEO strategy helps keep all your marketing activities working together, where they are sure to have the greatest collective impact.
Brad Shorr is Director of Content Strategy for Straight North, a Chicago based Internet marketing company. Brad writes frequently on social media, SEO and copywriting topics.
