How to Pick a Search Engine Marketing Strategy That Works

The impact that search engines have made on our lives is massive. They’ve become a portal to pretty much everything you ever need e.g. information, inspiration and shopping.

And that’s why Google receive nearly 16 billion visits per month, Yahoo draw in 6 billion visits and Bing manage to bag just over 1 billion visits. It makes for some amazing traffic, so it’s no surprise that businesses want to make sure their websites get as close to the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as possible.

Increasing your site’s visibility, however, isn’t straightforward and, no matter which niche you’re in, you’re going to find yourself up against a lot of competition. To give yourself a head start it’s a good idea to have a killer search engine marketing strategy in place.

Now, the biggest mistake people make is by not implementing any real search engine marketing strategy, so I’m going to take you through some of the techniques you have to adopt in order to head up the SERP!

Search Engine Marketing

Link Building Like a Professional

Link building is the simple act of creating links to your website online in order to highlight its popularity to the search engines.

Rewind a few years and this was a fairly easy search engine marketing strategy as search engines weren’t particularly smart and went for the old ‘quantity over quality’ maxim. However, search engines are becoming highly sophisticated creatures now and are likely to turn their nose up at spammy link building.

Instead, it’s essential that you aim to build links with authority websites e.g. a link to your Android app on a top tech site is going to be worth a lot more to your SERP ranking than a link stuffed in the comments of a soccer blog.

And, sure, this is a lot harder than copy and pasting your link all over the internet, but no one said it would be easy! Understandably, you’ll find that you build fewer links, but if you manage to secure links with major authorities then the search engines won’t be able to get enough of your content.

Do Your Keyword Research

I can’t underline just how important keyword research is as a search engine marketing strategy. Actually, scratch that, it’s essential if you even want to consider getting in the SERP!

It’s one of the most Google friendly techniques available and it’s relatively simple. If you know how to tackle it correctly.

Keywords, in a nutshell, are the words that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for e.g. “cheap Adidas sneakers”. And search engines will do their best to deliver the best opportunities for that searcher to find what they’re looking for.

Part of your search engine marketing strategy, then, should be to research which keywords are most popular with people online. Thankfully, there are a number of online tools available which can provide you with the stats for the most popular keywords, the most famous of which is Google’s Keyword Planner.

And once you’ve researched the most popular keywords which match your content you need to insert these into your content in the following ways:

  • In URLs
  • In Page Headings
  • In content

This will help the search engines match your content to those who are looking for it, but remember not to go overboard with the keywords. Search engines will frown upon attempts at keyword stuffing at the expense of great content.

Deliver Amazing and Relevant Content

Tinkering with link building and keywords is vital in order to push your site up the SERP, but it’s all going to be for nothing if your content doesn’t stand out as amazing.

You see, search engines make a lot of money these days from advertising and this is powered by huge amounts of traffic. That’s why they want to be serving up search results which give their customers exactly what they’re looking for, so the user experience has to be very special.

And your content needs to complement this.

Crafting original content, therefore, is crucial if you want search engines to reward your efforts with ranking points, so you should never try to repeat what someone else has already said. Of course, don’t think that certain topics are off topic due to having reached saturation point, just try and take them in a different direction.

Oh and try to keep topics relevant to your site too. Say, for example, you run a website about health food, you’re going to want to keep most of your content based in the health food/healthy living arena. If, however, you start running content based outside of this niche e.g. a news piece on the latest iPhone, then it’s going to look like you’re trying to pull in traffic for traffic’s sake.

And this won’t do your site any good or provide a decent experience for people clicking on their links – they want a site based around the world of tech, not sunflower seeds!