Search engine marketing is remarkable because, unlike almost every other form of marketing, it does not rely on the interruption technique. Think again for a moment about what I’ve called old-rules marketing and its interruption-based advertising techniques. As I’ve discussed in previous chapters, the old rules required you to interrupt TV viewers and hope they weren’t already flipping to another channel, interrupt people as they sorted through the mail and hope your message wouldn’t go into the junk mail pile, or interrupt magazine readers and hope they would pause at your stinky pull-out perfume sample. These days, ads are everywhere—on signs along the highway, on the sides of supermarket carts, in elevators. These interruptions are not only annoying for consumers (and harmful to a brand if overdone) but also increasingly ineffective.

Now think about how you use search engines. Unlike nontargeted, interruption-based advertising, the information that appears in search engines after you’ve typed in a phrase is content you actually want to see. You’re actually looking for it. This should be a marketer’s dream come true.

For example, when Shaquille O’Neal was on David Letterman’s talk show a few years ago discussing how he had enjoyed his life in Boston since he joined the Boston Celtics, Shaq said he found his multimillion-dollar house on Google! “I live in a small town called Sudbury,” he told Letterman. “I signed kind of late, so I really didn’t have a chance to find a house. So I went on Google and put ‘big house outside of Boston,’ and I found this big 10-acre [property with a] farmhouse.” A smart real estate mind with just the right information on the web scored big time with that one.

Here’s something very important to consider: This entire book is about search engine marketing. Please pause to reflect on that. If you followed the new rules of marketing and PR as outlined in these pages, you will have built a fantastic search engine marketing program! You started with your buyer personas, and then you built content especially for these buyers—content that talks about the problems they face in the words and phrases they actually use. Then you delivered the content in the online forms they prefer (podcasts, blogs, e-books, websites, and so on). This terrific content designed especially for your buyers will be indexed by the search engines, and that’s it. You already have a terrific search engine marketing program!

But even a great program can benefit from focused enhancements, so in this chapter we’ll talk about how to further develop and improve your search engine marketing strategies. Let’s start with a few basic definitions:

• Search engine marketing means using search engines to reach your buyers directly. Search engines include general search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, as well as vertical market search engines that are specific to your industry or to the people you are trying to reach.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by the search engines and that, once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural search results (i.e., what the search engine algorithm deems important for the phrase entered).
• Search engine advertising is when a marketer pays to have advertising appear in search engine results when a user types in a particular phrase that the marketer has purchased. Usually this advertising comes in the form of small text ads appearing next to the natural search results for a particular search term. Google AdWords¹ and Bing Ads² are the two large search engine advertising programs. Marketers bid to have their ads appear based on keywords and phrases, competing against others who want the same phrases. Your ad will appear somewhere in the list of ads for that phrase based on a formula used by the search engine that takes into account two main factors: how much you are willing to bid (in dollars and cents) for each person who clicks the ad, plus your click-through rate (the number of people who click your ad divided by the number of people who see it in the search results).

Making the First Page on Google

Colin Warwick, signal integrity product manager in the Design & Simulation Software Division of Keysight Technologies, is responsible for marketing software to help engineers overcome limitations in high-speed digital connections. As he was working on marketing plans, he came to the realization that traditional business-to-business marketing techniques like trade shows are expensive and increasingly ineffective. He also came to understand the importance of search engines for his business. “Everyone understands Google,” he says. “Everybody can instantly see when you enter a phrase into Google if your competitors come up and you don’t or vice versa.”

The most important search term for Warwick’s products is “signal integrity,” and Keysight product information was coming up on the fifth page of results—clearly not ideal. So Warwick set out to make Keysight appear at the top of the search results by creating a blog focused on signal integrity. Everything, from the name and URL of the blog to the excellent content, was designed to appeal to the buyer personas interested in this topic and to drive solid search engine rankings. “There are only 50,000 signal integrity engineers in the entire world, and our average sale is about $10,000 with a six-month sales cycle,” Warwick says. “While the competitors show their brochures, we have a valuable blog. It helps a great deal to have such valuable information, both for search engine results and in the selling process.”

Warwick says that executives at Keysight were very supportive of his starting the blog, but there were some guidelines that he had to work within. “The company said I could blog but that the IT department would not support it,” he says. “So I needed to create the blog outside of the company domain. I was required to follow some very commonsense rules: Don’t mention the competition, link to the Keysight terms of service and privacy policy, and include a copyright notice. It has been a very good experience. Companies need to trust that employees will do the right thing and let people blog.”

The results have been very encouraging. “Many customers say that they like the blog, and our salespeople tell prospects about it,” Warwick says. “Having a blog allows me to be spontaneous. For example, I can put diagrams up very quickly and let people know valuable information. If we needed to put content on the corporate site, it would take three days. With the blog I can get into a conversation in just five minutes.”

So what about the search results? On Google, Warwick’s blog is now on the first page of results for the phrase “signal integrity” (at the number four position when I checked). “Prior to starting the blog, the company products page was ranked number 44 on Google,” Warwick says. “That’s a huge improvement.”

But there are many added benefits to blogging that took Warwick by surprise. “Trade magazine journalists read the blog, and they include links to it in their blogrolls,” he says. “And I am making great web connections. For example, I asked an important journalist at EDN [a news and information source for electronics design engineers], to moderate a panel for me, and he did because he knows me from the blog.”

Search Engine Optimization

In my experience, people often misunderstand search engine marketing because there’s a slew of SEO firms that make it all seem so darned complicated. To add to the problem, many (but certainly not all) SEO firms are a bit on the shady side, promising stellar results from simply manipulating keywords on your site. Perhaps you’ve seen the spam email messages of some of these snake oil salespeople (I’ve received hundreds of unsolicited email messages with headlines like “Top Search Engine Rankings Guaranteed!”). While many search engine marketing firms are completely reputable and add tremendous value to marketing programs, I am convinced that the single best thing you can do to improve your search engine marketing is to focus on building great content for your buyers. Search engine marketing should not be mysterious and is certainly not trickery.

However, the many intricacies and nuances that can make good search engine marketing great are beyond the scope of this small chapter. Many excellent resources can help you learn even more about the complexities of search engine marketing and especially search engine algorithm factors such as the URL you use, placement of certain words within your content, tags, metadata, inbound links, and other details. These resources also add to our discussion in Chapter 10 of how to identify appropriate keywords and phrases. A great place to start understanding search engine optimization is Search Engine Watch,³ where you will find resources and active forums to explore. To learn more about search engine advertising, start with the tutorials and frequently asked questions pages of the Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo! Search Marketing sites.

Own Your Marketing Assets Instead of Renting Them

In the past several years, many more people than usual have asked me about advertising on the popular online ad networks: Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, and LinkedIn Ads. While a few people report that they are still having success with these networks, most say this form of advertising isn’t working as well anymore. I ask each of these people the same question: “Can you afford to rent your marketing?”

In the old days, advertising on Google AdWords was really successful for a lot of us. In the year or two after Google launched the ad platform, keyword buys were reasonably priced. With a decent landing page, companies could generate sales. In the past several years, the same has been true of newer ad networks from social networking sites. But as word spreads in the entrepreneurial and marketing communities, millions of people jump in. Prices have gone up significantly.

As always, if you’re generating success by paying for advertising, that’s great! Keep going! I’m not telling you to stop.

But for most of us, the answer is to shift our thinking from advertising (renting our marketing in the form of a monthly ad spend) to owning our marketing by creating original content that gets found by Google and is shared on the networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

When you rent a house, you have to keep paying your monthly rent. Over time, your rent is likely to increase. And the incentive for your landlord to improve your property goes down once you’re all moved in.

Instead you can buy a house and control where you live. Once you’ve paid for the house, it’s yours. And if your home climbs in value, your net worth increases. The same is true of the marketing assets you own. A blog post, e-book, video, or infographic is yours to keep. Forever. The content you created 10 years ago is still indexed by Google today.

Next time you stare at your monthly ad budget and shake your head in disgust, remember that you’re just renting your marketing. I’d encourage you to consider putting some of that advertising resource into a content creation initiative that you can own.

The Long Tail of Search

Perhaps you’ve already tried search engine marketing. Many marketers have. In my experience working with many organizations, I’ve learned that search engine marketing programs often fail because the marketers optimize on general keywords and phrases that do not produce sufficiently targeted results. For example, someone in the travel business might be tempted to optimize on words like travel and vacation. I just entered “travel” into Google and got over a billion hits! It is virtually impossible to get to the top of the heap with a generic word or phrase like travel, and even if you did, that’s not usually how people search. It is ineffective to try to reach buyers with broad, general search terms.

You have a choice when you create search engine marketing programs. One method is to optimize on and advertise with a small number of words and phrases that are widely targeted to try to generate huge numbers of clicks. Think of this approach as an oceangoing drag fishing boat being used to harvest one species of fish. Sure, its huge nets capture thousands of fish at a time, but if you throw away all that are not the species you’re after, it is a very expensive undertaking.

True success comes from driving buyers directly to the actual content they are looking for. Several years ago, I wanted to take my family on a vacation to Costa Rica, so I went to Google and typed in “Costa Rica adventure travel.” I checked out a bunch of sites at the top of the search results (both the natural search results and the advertisements) and chose one that appealed to me. After exchanging several emails to design an itinerary, I booked a trip for several thousand dollars, and a few months later we were checking out howler monkeys in the rain forest. This is how people really search (for what they are looking for on the web, not for howler monkeys). If you’re in the Costa Rican adventure travel business, don’t waste resources optimizing for the generic term travel. Instead, run search engine marketing programs for phrases like “Costa Rica ecotourism,” “Costa Rica rain forest tour,” and so on.

The best approach is to create separate search engine marketing programs for dozens, hundreds, or even tens of thousands of specific search terms that people might actually search on. Think of this approach as rigging thousands of individual baited hooks on a long line and exposing them at precisely the right time to catch the species of fish you want. You won’t catch a fish on each and every hook. But with so many properly baited hooks, you will certainly catch lots of the fish you are fishing for.

The Super Long Tail of Voice Search

With the tremendous rise of voice assistants from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple, the percentage of search traffic coming from voice is dramatically increasing. More and more people are using the voice-enabled features of their smartphones to ask questions. They’re also installing voice assistants in their homes and cars. TechCrunch estimates that a quarter of U.S. households now have at least one voice-assisted smart speaker.

When people search using a computer or smartphone keyboard, they typically type out a few words, like “Mexican restaurants in Boston.” There are likely to be ten or so results on the first page, and consumers will likely scan at least the first few results. Therefore, if you run a Mexican restaurant in Boston, holding the number two or three position in the search results is likely to greatly benefit your business.

It’s very different when people search through a voice assistant. Typically, the search is phrased as a question, using a complete sentence. Such searches are likely to be much more specific. For example, a voice search might ask, “What’s the best Mexican restaurant nearby that’s open now?”

What comes back via the voice assistant is one result. If you aren’t in the number one position for that search, you get zero people learning about your restaurant from voice assistants.

This new type of search situation means you need to try to understand all of the different ways people are likely to speak when asking about a topic related to your business. Create content accordingly.

A blog can be a great way to generate some of this long-tail content. Use headlines for your posts that correspond to how people might search by voice. Another strategy is to create a detailed Frequently Asked Questions page. Structure your FAQs around what people might ask a voice assistant. For example, the Boston Mexican restaurant might create questions and answers about wait times on a typical day, parking nearby, public transportation options, reservation availability, if alcohol is served, whether children are welcome, and so on.

If you run a local business, make sure you “claim” your My Google Business profile, and ensure that the content is up to date. This Google local listing appears on the right-hand side of the search results (or at the top on mobile!) when somebody enters your business name or closely associated keywords. This profile is where Google picks up details like your business hours, address, and telephone number. This result also features reviews, so encourage your customers to leave positive reviews on Google. This will help when people use words like “best” in their voice search.

Carve Out Your Own Search Engine Real Estate

One rarely discussed but very important aspect of search engine marketing is choosing product and company names so that they will be easy to find on the web via search engines. When you consider the name of a new company, product, book, rock band, or other entity that people want to find on the web, you typically go through a process of thinking up ideas, getting a sense of whether these names sound right, and then perhaps seeing if you can copyright or trademark the ideas. I would suggest adding one more vital step: You should run a web search to see if anything comes up for your proposed name. I urge you to drop the name idea if there are lots of similarly named competitors—even if the competition for the name is in a different industry. Your marketing goal should be that when someone enters the name of your book or band or product, the searcher immediately reaches information about it. For example, before I agree to book titles, I make certain those names are not being used in any other way on the web. It was important for me to own my titles on the search engines; searching on Eyeball Wars, Fanocracy, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, World Wide Rave, Marketing the Moon, and other titles brings up only my books plus reviews, articles, or discussions about them.

Many people ask me why I use my middle name in my professional endeavors, and I’ve had people accuse me of being pretentious. Maybe I am a bit pretentious, but that’s not why I use my middle name—Meerman. The reason is simple: There are so many other David Scotts out there. One David Scott walked on the moon as commander of Apollo 15. Another is a six-time Iron Man Triathlon champion. Yet another is a U.S. Congressman from Georgia’s 13th district. Good company all, but for clarity and search engine optimization purposes, I chose to be unique among my fellow David Scotts by becoming David Meerman Scott.

A side note on creating your own search engine real estate: You should avoid using special characters in your company or product names. Characters such as @, #, %, and so on are not easily indexed by the search engines. While there are exceptions (the C++ software program comes to mind), it is just too difficult to make product names using special characters index properly in search engines.

As you are thinking of names to use for marketing, test them out on the search engines first and try to carve out something that you alone can own.

Web Landing Pages to Drive Action

Although I won’t try to cover all the details of search engine marketing, I definitely want to touch on one of the most common mistakes made by search engine marketers. Most people focus a great deal of time on keyword and phrase selection (that’s a good thing!), and they also do a good job of ensuring that their organization ranks highly for those phrases by optimizing the site and/or purchasing search engine advertising. But most organizations are terrible at building a landing page—the place people go to after they click on a search hit.

Think back to our last example. As I was planning my family’s Costa Rican vacation, many of the sites that were ranked highly for the phrase I entered were a kind of bait and switch. I thought I would be getting targeted information about Costa Rican travel and was instead taken to a generic landing page from a big travel agency, an airline, or a hotel chain. No, thanks, I’m not interested. I wanted information on Costa Rica, not an airline or hotel chain, so I clicked away in a second. Because I wanted information about Costa Rican adventure travel, I chose the landing page that had the best information, one from an outfit called Costa Rica Expeditions.⁴ This means that you’re likely to need dozens or hundreds of landing pages to implement a great search engine marketing program.

Marketing with web landing pages is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to get your information read by a target market, and it’s a terrific tool for moving buyers through the sales cycle. A landing page is simply a place to publish targeted content for a particular buyer persona that you’re trying to market to, and landing pages are used not only in search engine marketing but also in other web marketing programs. For example, landing pages are ideal for describing special offers mentioned on your website or calls to action referenced on another content page (such as a blog or e-book). Landing pages also work well for telling an organization’s story to a particular target market, promoting a new product offering, or providing more information to people who link from your news releases.

Marketing programs such as search engine optimization are—to borrow an idea from the classic sales cycle definition—designed to attract the prospect’s attention. The landing page is where you take the next step; once you’ve got your audience’s attention, you must generate and develop customer interest and conviction, so that your sales team gets a warm lead ready to be worked to a closed sale, or so you can point people to an e-commerce page where they can buy your product right away.

Effective landing page content is written from—you guessed it—the buyers’ perspective, not yours. Landing pages should provide additional information to searchers, information based on the offer or keyword they just clicked on. Many successful organizations have hundreds of landing pages, each optimized for a particular set of related search engine marketing terms.

Don’t make the mistake so many organizations do by investing tons of money into a search engine advertising program (buying keywords) and then sending all the traffic to the home page. Because the home page needs to serve many audiences, there can never be enough information there for each search term. Instead, keep the following landing page guidelines in mind:

• Make the landing page content short and the graphics simple. The landing page is a place to deliver simple information and drive your prospect to respond to your offer. Don’t try to do too much.
• Create the page with your company’s look, feel, and tone. A landing page is an extension of your company’s branding, so it must adopt the same voice, tone, and style as the rest of your site.
• Write from the buyer’s point of view. Think carefully of who will be visiting the landing page, and write for that demographic. You want visitors to feel that the page speaks to their problems and that you have a solution for them.
• A landing page is communication, not advertising. Landing pages are where you communicate valuable information. Advertising gets people to click to your landing page, but once a prospect is there, the landing page should focus on communicating the value of your offering to the buyer.
• Provide a quote from a happy customer. A simple testimonial on a landing page works brilliantly to show people that others are happy with your product. A sentence (or two) with the customer’s name (and affiliation if appropriate) is all you need.
• Make the landing page a self-contained unit. The goal of a landing page is to get buyers to respond to your offer so you can sell to them. If you lose traffic from your landing page, you may never get that response. Thus, it is sometimes better to make your landing page a unique place on the web and not provide links to your main website.
• Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to. Make certain you provide a clear response mechanism for those people who want to go further. Make it easy to sign up, express interest, or buy something.
• Use multiple calls to action. You never know what offer will appeal to a specific person, so consider using more than one. In the business-to-business world, you might offer a white paper, a free trial, a return on investment (ROI) calculator, and a price quote all on the same landing page.
• Ask only for necessary information. Don’t use a sign-up form that requires your buyers to enter lots of data—people will abandon the form. Ask for the absolute minimum you can get away with—name and email address only, if you can, or perhaps even just email. Requiring any additional information will reduce your response rates.
• Don’t forget to follow up! Okay, you’ve got a great landing page with an effective call to action, and the leads are coming in. That’s great! Don’t drop the ball now. Make certain to follow up each response as quickly as possible.

Optimizing the Past

Want to know an SEO secret that almost nobody will tell you? Do not delete old content! Nearly all of your web content should live forever. It’s free to save pages on your site, so why delete them? Yet so many people do.

For example, I frequently see this mistake among conference organizers who have a site listing for their annual conference and each year delete the prior year’s pages, only displaying the current year’s conference. Because media sites, speakers, bloggers, and exhibitors all link to conference content, if the content is deleted soon after the conference ends, those links break. Anyone who tries to visit the site via those links gets an error message. And all SEO benefits from the links are lost.

A well-organized conference site is an important historical artifact that provides valuable information many years later. Who spoke that year? What panel discussions were held? What companies sponsored the event? People want to know that your conference has thrived for over a decade. Rather than using one conference URL, why not choose conference URL/2018 and then next year make it conference URL/2019 and so on? The homepage can then point to the current year’s conference.

There are many equivalent mistakes in other markets. For example, many companies delete old product content when the new model is released. Don’t do this! There are major SEO benefits from those old links to your site. Your search engine marketing benefits from multiple pages with many inbound links.

Cultivate your content with care, and it will serve as a marketing asset for years to come. I’ve been writing my blog since 2004, and the vast majority of my traffic from search engines comes from posts that are more than a year old. Other people tell me the same is true with their sites. For example, at HubSpot over 90 percent of leads come from blog posts that are more than a month old, and over 75 percent of HubSpot blog views come from these older posts.

Yet most content managers focus only on the latest blog post. That’s the primary content whose stats they measure. I’m guilty of this natural human behavior, too—I want to know how my latest effort is doing. But with so many leads coming from older posts, we can’t afford to ignore them. In fact, HubSpot has recently started an internal project dubbed “historical optimization.” Its entire focus is to increase traffic to and conversions from older blog posts.

Search Engine Marketing in a Fragmented Business

The market that Scala, Inc.,⁵ serves is so fragmented, people can’t even agree on what the product category is called: Digital signage, digital in-store merchandising, electronic display networks, electronic billboards, and any of a dozen other names are used. And to make the marketing challenge even more difficult, potential customers in this market don’t congregate at any one trade show, magazine, or web portal. And that’s just the way Gerard Bucas, president and CEO of Scala, Inc., likes it, because he uses search engine marketing to his advantage to reach buyers. “We pioneered the digital signage industry,” he says. “Our services are used for retail, corporate communications, factory floor, and many other diverse business applications.”

Because Scala serves so many buyers in diverse market segments, there is no clear decision maker. In retail, it’s the marketing department. In corporate communications for internal purposes, it is often the CEO or the HR department. And the company serves many verticals such as cruise lines, casinos, and more. “Since we can’t possibly advertise in so many different places to reach these people,” Bucas explains, “we rely on a great website with a strong focus on search engine marketing.”

Bucas says it is critical to use the same terminology as his target market and to include industry terms that lead to an appropriate Scala page. “We continuously monitor the top 30 to 40 search terms that people look for when they search for us on the Net,” he says. “When we find new terms, we write content that incorporates those terms, and as the term becomes more important, we expand on the content.”

For Bucas, effective search engine marketing means understanding his buyers and creating compelling content using important keywords and phrases, then getting each one indexed by the search engines. “For example, ‘digital signage’ is one of our search terms,” he says. “We want to be at the top of the results. But we also care about similar phrases such as ‘digital sign’ and ‘digital signs.’ Each of the terms gives different results. It’s amazing to me.”

The Scala site includes detailed product content, client case studies, and information on how digital signage is used in different industries. “Regular news releases and case studies are all intended to bring search engines to us,” he says. “With case studies and news releases, we’re getting some phrases into the market that we don’t often use, which cause some long-tail results with the search engines.”

Scala has a lead-generation system using search engines to drive buyers to landing pages where traffic converts into leads that are funneled into the company’s reseller channel. In this system, the company gathers names through offers (such as a free demo DVD) on each landing page. “Our resellers love us because we’re constantly pumping them with new leads,” Bucas says. “We effectively help to generate business for them, so they become very loyal to us. Our partners see the value of the lead generation.” According to Bucas, the lead system, which manages more than 4,000 open sales leads at any one time, automates communication at particular points in the sales process by sending email to buyers.

The success Scala enjoys shows how a well-executed content strategy on the web will deliver buyers to landing pages who are actually looking for a product. “We are growing very rapidly,” Bucas says. “And a large percentage of the business comes from web leads—certainly more than 50 percent of our business comes from the web.”

If you’re planning on implementing the ideas in this book, you will, by definition, be doing search engine marketing. You will understand your buyers and create great, indexable web content especially for them. The best search engine marketing comes from paying attention to and understanding your buyers, not from manipulating or tricking them. Still, once you’ve executed a great content strategy, adding effective landing pages and focusing on the long tail of search terms will give you an even more powerful marketing asset that will generate results for months and years to come.