CHAPTER 4
Search
“Your search strategy is your business strategy whether you realize it or not, because that’s how potential customers are trying to find you.”
—Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing in the Age of Google (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010)
A search strategy is essential; it is the online equivalent to your business’s front door. Even if you are outsourcing search functions or have relegated them to agency or staff, it is important to understand what aspects will make your business thrive. Search is the number one engagement vehicle online, and it is still the most efficient way to magnetize new customers toward your brand. In one branding study, 39 percent of searchers perceived those in the highest page rank as the top brands in their fields!
In this chapter, we will:
1. Demystify search and provide an understanding of its role in marketing.
2. Teach how to use search marketing to draw your audience to your content, especially your website.
3. Provide guidance on the most important search metrics marketers need to follow.
4. Position you to take advantage of where search is headed.
Think back for a moment to when there was no search. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Yet it wasn’t so long ago that we looked up telephone numbers in a telephone book or dialed a live operator. Homework assignments and term papers were researched in the library. Shopping was done on foot in the mall. Comparison shopping, if you want to call it that, meant spreading out store flyers across the kitchen ...
