Many of aXcelerate’c clients have often discussed the difficulty they have with understanding SEO (search engine optimisation) and how to use it effectively within their business’s marketing and management systems. Consequently we have gotten our resident expert, our Marketing Guru Tom Chalmers, to uncover the mysteries behind Google SEO, in order to provide further understanding to all of our clients.
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Late on a Friday night I decided rather suddenly that I’d like to go and get some Mexican food. Unsure whether the specific restaurant I was planning on visiting was open, I simply google-searched the name of the chain and nothing else. The first thing on my results page was a map pointing me to the closest franchise to where I was at the time, with a contact number and opening hours directly underneath. In case I’d missed it, there was even some bold red text reading “closed now”. While this is the type of result I’ve become accustomed to seeing, as has anyone with a smartphone, I couldn’t help but be a little impressed with how exactly Google had delivered for me. It was certainly not luck or chance that matched my simple query to such a precise response – it was the result of Google’s well-documented obsession with achieving relevance through tweaking, testing and experimenting to find the perfect algorithm. The point I’m trying to make here is that as a company Google seems to see no limits to the pursuit of displaying the correct result to searches – in the long-term, pages that should be shown for a query will be shown. Spending time and money on planning what queries your business would like to rank well for, or could rank well for is ineffective. The focus should always be on what queries your business should rank for.
A huge proportion of Google searches are either direct business and product searches or information-seeking queries involving products and services. It is in this information seeking where the grey area of content emerges. Too often searchers in this category are seen as fish. Provide the right bait (which can be readily researched), lure up and cast out. The problem is that getting a click through to a desired page isn’t the same as catching a fish. The users behind these queries are free to digest the page’s content as they wish, look deeper on to a website, or leave without exploring. People are also very aware of when they are being advertised to, and if it is inappropriate, or if they feel they have been deceived in to clicking through to the web page this is not just a lost customer. This is someone with a bad taste in their mouth. A business guilty of this will then occupy a negative space in the user’s mind. Given the huge importance of word-of-mouth these days, this is an absolutely disastrous outcome. Far worse than having never had a user come to your page in the first place. How then, to harness the volume of searches made daily to achieve awareness, interest, desire and action? Be like Google, be like Yellow Pages – provide something relevant. Here are some interesting examples of success and failure when it comes to this.
Big Success – Red Bull Stratos
Energy drink giant Red Bull sent a man up in to the stratosphere to complete the largest free-fall in history as part of a wide-spanning marketing and branding plan. While this particular case extends way beyond the realm of SEO, it is worth noting that the original live filming was only viewable on an official Red Bull website. Traffic increases would have been phenomenal – and so too would the knock-on traffic to the various Red Bull entities (Music, Surf, Skate, Red Bull TV etc.) that are often considered under appreciated for their quality.
US-based family business Blendtec creates – you guessed it – blenders for the home. The blenders they create are incredibly powerful and what better way of showing them off than by blending things that were never meant to, nor would anyone have guessed could, be blended. The videos they made were essentially wildly popular, thoroughly entertaining product demonstrations.
These examples are food for thought for companies wanting to create content outside of the box and prove that effective SEO via Google can be done; don’t lose hope!
The key to achieving long-term SEO goals is to find the sweet spot. A search needs to be made that, between the searcher and the business, is mutually beneficial. The searchers also need to be the right searchers. Whatever is being created should ideally show up on results pages for searches that are being made from people who are likely to be interested in the product or service a business is offering. Say, for example, that users searching for training courses are being sought. A beauty-therapy training course and a leadership management course are worlds apart, and it’s safe to assume that the searcher knows precisely which type of training course they are interested in. An intent searcher would have also included it in the query entered. Here is the number of searches for three keywords for the month of April in Queensland, Australia:
Keyword Monthly Searches
training courses 480
leadership management 70
beauty therapy courses 90
*Data gathered from Google AdWords Keyword Planner
People searching for “training courses” will be seeking a variety of information on a variety of topics, and they will also be in a variety of states along the path-to-purchase. While the volume of people searching “leadership management” or “beauty therapy courses” is far lower, those particular queries show a lot more intent to use a service. This kind of targeting makes planning content creation much clearer, and armed with this knowledge we’ll return to the point I made previously about focusing on the should instead of the could.
This “should” is the muse to draw on in creating content and directly translates in to the question – “what can our business create that either no one else can, or no one can create as good?” The question could also be posed as – “what specifically does our business know more about than anyone else?” The answer lies in a business’s core competencies and the key to harnessing search volumes is in leveraging core competencies to create something mutually beneficial for the business and potential customers. Just as people searching for leadership management will want different things from their results than people searching for beauty therapy courses, each group will require different content strategies to increase their likelihood of converting to customers.
Figuring out precisely what content to create will take time and creativity. It does not require a large ongoing budget drain, as Blendtec showed – uniqueness will do far more for achieving high rankings. It is important to bear in mind however that content does age, people do change and consumer tastes move. A good idea will be one that lends itself to ongoing updates and reinvention. Sourcing the keyword volumes is the beginnings to any modern market research as it helps define market sizes, but, aside from this, leave the technical wizardry to Google. No one in the world is better positioned to create effective content for a business and its potential customers than that business itself – as it should be.