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

A BETTER STRATEGY FOR INCREASED CUSTOMERS AND A MORE SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

Once you’ve got a sense of the types of things your target audience is interested in the most and how competitive those markets are, you can consider the impact on your business in a number of ways:

• Product strategy: Are you providing the types of things your audience is looking for? Are you investing resources in areas that your audience isn’t interested in at the expense of areas that it is? If you identify gaps between your product offering and what you find your audience is interested in based on search data, you may want to spend a bit more time asking your customers, setting up focus groups, or analyzing spending patterns.
• Business strategy: Is your industry in decline or a state of growth? Are you using the best revenue model for your business? Or are you trying to sell everyone new home loans when they’re looking to refinance their mortgages?
• Search acquisition strategy: What audience and interests lead to the highest conversion rates? What audience is large enough without overwhelming competition? What search terms should you target, and what kind of experience should you make available on the site? This process is very similar to the ways you can use these data when building your product and business strategies.

You already know how to use data effectively to improve your product and business strategies, but what about your organic search strategy? The key is to understand the search acquisition ...