Creating Successful Businesses with SEO & Analytics

By now you’ve probably seen millions of ads on TV, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, billboards… the list goes on! However, a very effective, yet often forgotten or overlooked way of marketing to consumers is the use of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This weeks lecture has brought to my attention just how useful this can be to a business’s success.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the “promotion of an organisation through search engines to meet its objectives by delivering relevant content in the search listings for searchers and encouraging them to click through to a destination site” (Chaffey et al, 2012).

More specifically, it is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that a lot of marketers are not taking advantage of. SEO is “a structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in search engine natural or organic results listings for selected keywords or phrases” (Chaffey et al, 2012).

SEO can be adopted by arguably all business’s marketing strategy teams, to increase the awareness of the products or services they are offering.

There are certain SEO approaches that can be used to increase the amount of consumers that will come across your organisation. These include:

• Search Engine Submission - Google needs to be aware that your company exists so that it can suggest your business to users that search for your services.

• Index inclusion - Ensure all subpages are listed, so that everything that is relevant to your business is included in the information available to those searching for it.

• Key Phrase Analysis - Include the terms that your customers are going to search when looking for your business, this could be certain adjectives specific to your company’s offerings, a location, product type etc.

As Bob Napier, former HP CIO, once said, “I firmly believe, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.

This brings us to Analytics and how important it is when it comes to SEM. It is the techniques used to assess and improve the contribution of e-marketing to a business, including reviewing traffic volume, referrals, clickstreams, online reach data, customer satisfaction surveys, leads and sales - all of which provide valuable insights into what companies are doing well, and what they could be doing better.

In order to make use of these analytics to gain favourable performance outcomes, there are a set of ‘tests’ that can be assessed to ensure consumers are inclined to view your page. This includes testing if you are using the right wording, fonts, colours, placement, captions and descriptions, the overall layout, how you promote offers and the types of images you use to catch the attention of your audience.

Not to mention that this kind of marketing must be user friendly and take into account the types of devices people are using to view their pages. This means content has to be formatted so that it is suitable to the screen size, such as the placement of the ad on the users screen - consumers don't want to have to scroll right to the bottom of their phone to find what they were looking for.

I, personally, have used analytics to help grow certain Instagram accounts I’ve had. Instagram provides this data for ‘professional’ pages, where the owner is able to see a summary of how many views, likes, comments, reposts, and followers they have attained over certain periods. I used these insights to see the kinds of post I should continue to post (ones that performed well according to the data), as it was what my followers wanted to see and engaged with most.

It all comes down to measuring what matters, and in a social media context, it is the growth and engagement of users, effectiveness of the content strategies you’ve implemented, and the quality of your audience (returning users and sharing of your page).

So, If you had a business would you invest in SEO marketing? Would you make use of insights? Let me know in the comments! :)