When it comes to reaching your audience effectively online, putting all of your eggs into one basket is a risky move. Since users have the ability to connect in so many ways, smart marketers and business owners are developing strategies that consist of a number of tactics meant to complement each other. The entire concept of inbound was built with this idea in mind.
As technology continues to evolve, our strategies need to change as well. Two tactics that we have seen a lot of success with by fusing them together are personalization and SEO. In the video below I’ll share how SEO and personalized marketing can work together to drive better traffic and increase site conversions.
Transcript
Hey, what’s going on everybody? I’m Ryan Shelley, and this is the SMA marketing minute. Today I want to talk about how I fused two of my favorite online marketing strategies together to both improve our organic traffic and increase the number of conversions through our website. I’m talking about search engine optimization and personalized marketing, so let’s see how they work together and how they could possibly help you turn your website into a lead-generation machine.
SEO is all about driving organic free traffic to your website. Now, when somebody sits down on a computer, and they begin to ask a search engine a question, what they’re hoping for is to get the best possible answer in return. Now, the first couple of slots, depending on the search engine you’re on, are actually going to be dedicated to ad space. This is how search engines make money, and companies actually will pay to get their listings up there. There’s a ranking algorithm for that as well, but that’s known as pay-per-click. That also kind of falls under what we would call search engine marketing. I’m talking about SEO, and these are the rankings right below that, the non-paid listings.
The non-paid listings actually have a lot of trust by the consumer. Consumers trust especially those top three listings on a Google or another search engine’s search results. What we want to do is begin to move our site up by developing good content, by generating good backlinks, but then making sure that we’re understanding the target audience we’re marketing to. You need to make sure that your content isn’t just good, but that your content’s great – that it solves problems and that it’s what the user actually wants to know. This is what Google is going to reward.
Google has gotten into the personalization game on their own. They’re using an AI technology known as RankBrain. Now what RankBrain is trying to do is understand trends in both the way you interact with Google and other users like you interact with Google in order to help you find the best answer faster. It’s starting to understand why users search what they search and how they search what they search in order to give them a better experience. Basically, what Google is doing is trying to personalize the results to best fit your needs.
How can you also use personalization on your website in order to not only drive better leads but also convert those leads once they come on your site?
At Shelley Media Arts we’re a BrightInfo partner, and BrightInfo is a personalization, marketing, and sales enablement software. They have an algorithm of their own, and what this algorithm does is it begins to understand your users as they interact with your site. Now, you may have a variety of different services or products that you offer on your website, and not every single one of those is appropriate for everybody that comes onto your site. If a user has to spend a lot of time searching for the answers, they’re more likely to leave your site than they are to keep digging.
What personalization can do is help understand your customer as they begin to interact with your site to make sure that they get the right content, the right service, the right product at the right time. What this does is it makes their life a whole lot easier. It shows that you actually care about their needs and helping them solve their problems. Personalization is a powerful way to not just increase engagement but also to increase brand trust over time.
We’ve been using personalization on our software, and in the first month, we saw over a three hundred percent increase in leads. That’s three hundred percent and over time it keeps giving back and giving back and giving back to our company, to our site, and to our brand. People stay on our site longer. They engage longer. They share it more often because they find it helpful because our site is tailored to meet their specific needs.
As an SEO and somebody who’s been in the SEO community for a while, I love finding ways to help companies get more exposure online. This means targeting the right keywords. This means writing powerful content that actually moves the readers to click to engage, but it also means helping those companies turn those visitors into sales. Turn those visitors into brand enthusiasts.
Now, there’s a number of ways that we can help these companies gain exposure in the search engine rankings. Links are important, but you’ve got to have the right links. Penguin 4.0 is now part of the Google algorithm. This means Google is going to be constantly looking more in-depth at your backlink profile. So, make sure that you’re backlinking the right way. That you’re building human connections online. That you’re creating connections that lead to links and earning links that are going to promote your site. Don’t buy links from bad places. Make sure that you’re doing it right.
Take time then to develop great content. Spend some time and research the topics. Research the pain points and try to really understand your users. This is going to help you build content that’s going to help you even more once that person comes to your site and you enable personalization. SEO takes time. SEO is a long game strategy. Looking for quick wins often leads you to making bad decisions, purchasing bad links, and getting yourself in a position that’s ultimately going to hurt your business. Take your time with SEO. Do it right. It will pay off in the long run.
Now, one of the things we talk about with SEO is keywords. Understanding the types of terms that people search for online. Now while more people are searching with mobile devices and using voice commands, we’ve kind of trained ourselves to still search the way we would on a desktop or on a mobile device. We still kind of talk like we’re typing in. We don’t really talk to our AI technology as if it’s another human being, so understanding keyword research is really important. This also helps in personalization because when you can add those strong keywords multiple times into your content, it’s going to help personalization software better pick up on the types of things that your users are really interested in.
By fusing personalization and SEO, not only will it help you develop better content, it’s going to help you lower your bounce rate by increasing engagement. Then personalization’s going to make your site a destination that your users want to spend time on and engage with because it brings it down to their level and it puts your message into their context. One of the things about communication that we often forget is that if our audience doesn’t understand what we’re talking about to the point where they can’t comprehend and engage, it’s not their fault. It’s ours.
As marketers, as online businesses, we need to understand what our users are looking for and begin to speak in terms that they understand so that they convert and that they get the products and services that we know we believe in and we know that they need.
I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the SMA marketing minute. We hope that you guys check out a few other things on our site. If you need any help or you have any questions, please email me at Ryan@smamarketing.net. Thanks a lot, and happy marketing.
