Search Engine Marketing as a Branding Tool

The hidden story of search engine marketing

Search engine marketing serves the most obvious purpose of attracting traffic to your site. But that’s not the only work it does. It positions you; it brands you. In this blog, we’ll look at six ways that you can strengthen your brand and, as a result, strengthen your search engine marketing:

1. Define your business and services. While many businesses think they can define their business and their services, they are really just defining them from an industry insider’s perspective. Instead, define your business and your services from a customer perspective: To use one real-estate-related search engine marketing example: People won’t search for “I want a real estate agent”; they’ll search for “I want to buy a home.”

2. Developing your marketing materials and your story. You can’t do it all; there are simply too many marketing options out there. So, decide what your story is (summarize it like an elevator pitch) and then decide which of the many marketing options available are best to relate your story. Be sure to develop a mix of search engine marketing and offline marketing to get a good mix.

3. What makes your brand stand out? Every brand needs to have something unique; otherwise you’ll just get lost in the crowd. As you build up a reputation online, people will start to search for what makes you unique. This also helps local search engine marketing as well if your brand is related to a narrowly defined geographic area.

4. Building and managing your brand online. This is where search engine marketing comes into play: While you’re creating content to push or pull traffic to your website, that content is also establishing your brand. By the time people get to your website they are already familiar with who you are, what you do, and what makes you unique.

5. Manage your brand reputation online.  Search engine marketing is not a “set it and forget” effort. You need to be consistent and strategic in order to maintain your reputation. Develop a search engine marketing strategy that has a long-term timeline with plenty of short-term effort spaced evenly throughout.

We’ll talk more about branding in the weeks to come!

SEO Conundrum

As a business owner, you have two distinct actions you want your customers to take: You want them to find your website and then you want them to buy from you. You help them find your website with search engine marketing, which is a combination of off-site content distributed around the web and on-site content that attracts searchers. And you help them buy from you with on-site sales content.

How search engine optimization fits in

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a big part in the first step of this activity. You might incorporate SEO techniques into articles and press releases you distribute around the web; and at the same time, you might incorporate SEO techniques on your website so that it’s easier for search engines to find you.

The problem with SEO

Now here’s where the conundrum is: You need people to find you so it’s tempting to optimize your keywords to make it optimal for search engines. BUT, you need people to eventually buy so you want your content to make sense to them so that they are participating in your sales funnel. Unfortunately, these are not always congruent goals! Some experts pin optimal keyword density at 4%, which means that you need to have the same keyword appear 4 times in 100 words. That might be fine for search engines, and it might even be okay for some keywords, but a lot of keywords (especially long-tail keywords) start to seem excessive when written at that density. In a 500 word article, a keyword needs to appear 20 times. That’s excessive for any live reader. Your work might be search engine optimized but it is not human reader optimized!

When your reader finds your content annoying or difficult to understand, they will not buy from you. So, you might enjoy a lot of traffic (which accomplishes your first goal) but you won’t see as much sales (your second goal).

There are other techniques that you can use in your search engine marketing in order to reduce keyword density and improve readability while still creating search engine friendly content! That’s what this blog is all about!

The Number One Search Engine Marketing Success Secret

A web presence is essential for today’s businesses, but simply putting up a website or blog isn’t enough. You need traffic. (It’s not that different in the offline world: You can set up a store but it’s no good unless people find you!)

So, how do you help that traffic find you? There are a number of ways you can generate traffic – from paid search to viral videos to social media to articles. No matter what combination of search engine marketing you do, there is one single search engine marketing secret that will make all the difference. Follow this one secret by making sure that all of your search engine marketing complies, and you’ll generate traffic.

The search engine marketing secret
The best way to generate traffic is by building credibility. Credibility is the magnet that will attract prospects to you so you can sell to them. All of your search engine marketing – when done correctly – will contribute to a growing sense of credibility that will help you to convince your prospects to buy.

In fact, the most popular search engine is set up to encourage you and enable you to become more credible. Google uses the concept of PageRank, which was named for Google co-founder Larry Page. Google’s game changing impact on the internet was its idea that each link to your website was a “vote” for your website’s credibility. That sounds like a good idea, but they took it one step further with PageRank: The value of a vote was higher from sites that were more credible themselves.

For example, there could be two equal sites on the web but one has a higher PageRank because highly valued, thoughtful, informative, and useful sites link to it compared to the other site.

Then, Google would use each site’s PageRank as a factor in deciding where to place it in a search result. Generally, pages with a higher PageRank appear closer to the top of search results because it has been “voted” more credible.

How credibility impacts your search engine marketing
When you’re planning what your search engine marketing efforts, you need to make sure that one of your activities is to build links back to your website using highly credible sources.

Press releases are a good example of this because news sites often have higher PageRank. Some articles, distributed to the right article distribution sites, can offer a similar result. If you create a blog or a YouTube channel or a Flickr account, these can all help link back from high PageRank sites, giving you votes of credibility.

To start, think about your industry and where the most credible websites are likely to be. Use a tool like PRChecker.info (http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php) to check for the PageRank of the target sites you’d like to do your search engine marketing through. When you find higher ranking pages, find ways to link back to your site from there. It could include submitting articles or participating on a forum or having your blog posted there.

No matter what type of search engine marketing you choose to do, just remember to make sure it builds your credibility. And when you do enough of that, you will successfully build web traffic to your small business.