Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

SEARCH ACQUISITION STRATEGY PROCESS

As you probably realize by now, a successful search acquisition strategy involves more than just someone at the company with the job title of search engine optimizer (see Chapter 6 for more details about search engine optimization [SEO] and how it ties into a successful search strategy). A successful strategy involves:

• Ensuring all business and product goals are aligned and using search data as a key part of market research.
• Identifying a target audience that is most likely to turn into customers.
• Determining the queries that fit your business needs and are conducted by your target audience in significant volumes.
• Building content that not only ranks well for those queries but also provides a user experience that helps searchers complete their tasks and engages them more deeply with your business.
• Offering a call to action that compels the searcher deeper into the conversion funnel.
• Understanding what metrics provide actionable insights into the effectiveness of the strategy.

This process involves the following steps:

• Identify your business goals:

  What is the business’s purpose?

  What is the website’s purpose?

• Assess the market opportunity:

  Based on keyword research, what searches are relevant to your business?

  What’s the overall volume? ...