SEO/SEA: Why is Google not enough?

When you are looking to promote your products online, visibility on Google is essential. But when it comes to generating new business opportunities, Google is not enough.

In an increasingly connected world, you need to adapt to the new ways in which prospects consume information. The time has come to adopt best practices to achieve your leads generation targets.

Here are the reasons why Google is not enough to put your products on your prospects’ radar and generate leads.

In today’s world, everyone has the same instinct of using Google’s search engine when looking for information. Basically, you have no choice but to use its website and work on your SEO to appear in the first results pages.

This move will obviously generate traffic and attract prospects, but it is not enough when trying to achieve your specific leads objectives.

1. Know your audience

An effective SEO strategy will not stake everything on Google. The starting point when thinking about SEO is knowing your audience and prospects.

Why should you analyze your audience and prospects?

If you do not know who your prospects are, there is no way that you can create quality content that will satisfy what they are looking for.

Therefore, the first stage involves defining personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, and they will give you an insight into their expectations, needs and objectives.

You can use personas to create relevant content that is closely aligned with your target market’s questions.

2. Gear your content towards your prospects

Achieving a high ranking on Google is a challenge for most companies. But there is no point featuring high up the list for queries that are not used by the target audience.

Nowadays, you need to do more than just create content for Google and to achieve a good ranking. You have to write for your audience and forge your reputation as an expert.

I am not saying that you should stop designing your site with search engines in mind, but the priority should be thinking about the target market, providing support and educating them throughout the buyer’s journey. Your SEO approach must be tailored to your personas.

In other words, prospects are the focal point of any content strategy.  Each type of content must answer the question that your prospects are asking and it must respect the buyer’s journey.

For example, the website must contain awareness content, which corresponds to the phase where prospects realize that they have a problem.

It must also contain consideration content, which refers to the phase where prospects will define their problem in clear terms and look for a solution accordingly. Finally, the website will contain decision content, allowing prospects to choose the solution best suited to their needs.

3. Promote your content

Once you have created and published your content on the website, search engines will index it. Prospects looking on the Internet for solutions to their problems will be likely to find them if the content has been effectively designed to match their problems and also SEO-optimized for the search engines.

But that is not the end of the story! Content needs to be promoted. You should not sit back and wait for prospects to simply stumble across your content.

To promote your content and reach out to more prospects, once again it is important to know how prospects look for information and the media that they use.

Several strategies are available to marketing professionals for promoting their content and generating leads.

• Email campaigns

Email campaigns continue to be the most widely used method for generating new business opportunities. It is a favorite tool for B2B marketing professionals. Sending a message that corresponds to a well-defined target market has every chance of generating new leads.

• Newsletters

Newsletters can be sent to a database of contacts to promote the content published on the website. You can also use advertising space in the newsletters sent out by the websites that your prospects typically visit.

• Banner ads

Banner ads are also an excellent way of generating traffic on a website.

It is important to know which sites your prospects visit, so that you can communicate on the platforms that they tend to use.

• Social networks

As with banner ads, it is vitally important to find out which social networks your prospects use, so that you can publish content on those sites and in their chat groups.

• Paid ad campaigns

This type of tool can help overcome a poor ranking for an important query. Paid ads can also promote a temporary special offer.

As we have seen, Google may play an important role for every website, but it alone is not enough to generate new business opportunities and maximize your exposure among your prospects.

Knowing your target market is key to defining an effective content strategy to attract visitors to your website.

Implementing SEO best practices will reinforce all your efforts on the content, and using digital marketing tools will help promote your content on the different media.