Acing Your Search Strategy

Visibility is key for any business: Consumers are out there looking for answers to their problems, and you want to position your brand as the solution. As such, it’s important that your company can be found by those who are looking—and the place people are looking is online. If you want to bring in new leads and convert customers, there’s simply no excuse for not prioritizing search engine visibility, ensuring that your company can easily be located by those who are using Google and Bing.

Achieving a good search engine ranking isn’t something that happens by accident, though, nor does it happen overnight. It requires commitment to a broad search engine strategy, one that you adhere to over time. This search engine strategy should ultimately inform all aspects of your online marketing.

The Components of a Good Search Strategy

It’s important to note that different companies will have different search strategies, simply depending on their goals, their budget, and the nature of their industry. With that said, these general guidelines are applicable across the board.

• The first thing you need is a searcher persona. Who are the people who you’re trying to connect with? Who are the folks who are looking for products or services like yours? What are the problems they are trying to solve? What are their values? A searcher persona can help you shape and direct all other aspects of your strategy.
• What are the keywords you should be targeting? Google AdWords’ keyword research tool can help you get a sense of words and phrases related to your industry, and also to determine which ones are competitive and which ones are within your reach. Again, keywords can give your entire campaign a sense of focus.
• It also helps to have a list of competitors, which will let you see what they’re doing that works—and what doesn’t. Pay attention to how the members of your industry distinguish themselves online, and look for an opening for your own brand.
• A content analysis also helps. What kinds of content do you need in order to reach your targeted searchers and to encompass your targeted keywords? What Web pages, social media profiles, or blogs do you need to create and to optimize?
• Finally, a good dashboard for search metrics will help you to keep tabs on your progress, and to revise your search strategy over time; Google Analytics is the most common one, and a good one to begin with.

This is really just the barest outline of a search strategy, but it’s nevertheless a good step in the right direction. For your second step, look into some of the marketing resources we offer at ACES!