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Join us for this informative webinar, as link building expert Jon Ball will reveal the closely guarded secrets that have propelled Page One Power to become a highly successful $10 million agency.
Join us for this informative webinar, as link building expert Jon Ball will reveal the closely guarded secrets that have propelled Page One Power to become a highly successful $10 million agency.
Learn how to adapt to the evolving digital landscape and future-proof your brand’s organic success with these 5 essential building blocks.
It’s not uncommon for SEO professionals to find themselves thrust into a role with little to no training in traditional marketing theory.
However, as the organic landscape becomes increasingly complex and fragmented, the need to understand and integrate timeless marketing principles into your SEO strategy has never been more critical.
Relying on search engines alone is no longer enough to maximize your organic exposure to potential customers.
Today, users discover information on the internet from a variety of sources.
With the advent of AI-driven search and expanding paid search placements, we’re navigating a terrain where organic real estate in search results is shrinking, and search engines are just one part of an incredibly complex buyer journey.
Platforms such as TikTok (used by 40%+ Gen Z users as a search engine), Pinterest, and Reddit all present opportunities for additional organic reach outside of Google search – which means your strategy needs to evolve from search engine optimization to multi-platform organic optimization.
This shift requires a holistic understanding of marketing that transcends algorithms and dives deep into consumer behavior, strategic planning, and long-term brand building.
In this post, I’ll cover five essential marketing concepts that not only complement but can redefine and elevate your search performance.
In the following sections, I’ll explore each principle in detail, shedding light on how they can be applied and the tangible benefits they offer, all rooted in proven marketing science.
3Cs research is a foundational aspect of marketing that can be leveraged to enhance your organic strategy.
It means building a deeper understanding of your company, your customers, and the overall category or industry.
Let’s delve into each of these areas and explore their relevance for SEO.
Company research is about understanding your business (or your clients’ business) inside out. It should dig deeper into your internal understanding of:
Armed with a deeper understanding of the market and the trends shaping the future of the market, you’ll be able to focus your efforts on producing content that will better resonate with potential buyers.
Additionally, understanding the company’s positioning and key objectives will help you tie back your performance to higher-level goals and better prove value to senior stakeholders.
Undertaking high-level business objectives will help you ladder up your organic reporting to showcase results to the C-suite.
Showing how your organic KPIs can help deliver broader marketing and business objectives will help showcase the value of organic to any business.
This involves identifying your target audience’s characteristics, needs, and behaviors through both qualitative (e.g., depth interviews) and quantitative (e.g., surveys) research.
Having a better understanding of who you’re targeting allows you to create content that resonates with that audience, improving overall organic reach for relevant topics, and boosting engagement and conversion rates.
By understanding your audience’s needs and pain points, you can craft more relevant content, drive more clicks to your website, and build your brand presence alongside the most timely themes.
What It Is
Category research is understanding the broader market, competitors, trends, and potential opportunities or threats within the industry.
Understanding the industry landscape allows you to identify gaps and opportunities competitors may have overlooked.
At a basic level, analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles can uncover opportunities for new backlinks, strengthening your site’s authority.
You can also utilize tools such as SimilarWeb to assess the networks and channels that your competitors are investing in that are delivering the best results organically:
By delving deeper into 3Cs research, you’ll gain deeper insights that aligns SEO with the broader business strategy, delivering more value to the brands you work with.
Segmentation involves breaking down the total market (e.g., every golfer on the planet) into smaller, more manageable segments (e.g., golfers over 50 years of age).
Targeting focuses on selecting the most lucrative segments to pursue based on market fit, size, and growth potential.
By understanding which customer segments are most important to your business, you can create highly targeted organic strategies and focus your efforts on the right audiences.
Segmentation involves dividing the broad market into smaller, distinct groups based on characteristics like demographics, psychographics, behavior, or geography.
Targeting involves choosing which segments to focus on based on their potential value and alignment with your business.
Dividing your audience into segments allows you to tailor your SEO strategies to meet each group’s specific needs and preferences.
This leads to more relevant content and better engagement with the content you create.
Focusing on the most lucrative or relevant segments ensures that your SEO efforts are directed where they will have the most impact.
This principle will allow you to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to a more nuanced, personalized strategy that aligns with the unique needs and wants of different customer segments.
Brand positioning is about creating a unique, positive image of your brand in the customer’s mind.
It is the theme that should act as the golden thread across all marketing activity.
Positioning is the perception that you intend your customers to have about your products or services.
Successful positioning involves defining what sets you apart from the competition and why they should choose your brand over the competition, which should result in clearer messaging that shows up in campaigns and creative assets.
Effective positioning enhances brand recall, trust, and credibility.
How you position your brand can profoundly impact your organic performance, bring in more branded traffic through search, and lead to higher conversion rates for existing website traffic.
By understanding the unique selling points and themes that set your brand apart from the competition, you can focus in on increasing content in line with these themes to ensure you maximize organic visibility to underpin your brand’s unique positioning.
For example, Red Bull’s brand positioning revolves around “giving you wings.”
This transcends every marketing activity it invests in as a brand.
It wants to be synonymous with excitement and risk-taking, and it has succeeded at this attempt through various campaigns.
From an organic standpoint, understanding this positioning can inform content, PR and co-branding opportunities and ensure that any content suggestions you put forward are aligned with your company’s brand positioning.
Developments such as Google’s Search Generative Experience, the rise of social platforms as search engines, and the growing influence of creators on organic performance all highlight the complexity of the current organic landscape.
Effective media planning means selecting the right channels but also understanding when and how to use them.
Whether it’s social media, paid, or organic search, achieving maximum brand exposure wherever your customers are online is critical to growth in such a complex ecosystem.
Media planning is traditionally associated with advertising. However, in the context of SEO and organic search, it’s equally important.
Media planning for organic search includes identifying and leveraging various online channels, like search engines, social media, review platforms, third-party sites, and more, to distribute and promote content to potential customers wherever they are online.
Effective media planning ensures that your content reaches the right audience at the right time. It’s not about creating high-quality content but about ensuring that content is seen and engaged with.
Approach organic with a media planning mindset, and you’ll expand your view beyond traditional search engine optimization, generating much greater organic reach.
Full-funnel measurement goes beyond traditional SEO metrics like rankings and traffic.
It looks at the entire customer journey, from awareness to conversion, to understand how users are interacting with your content and how it leads to sales.
While traditional SEO often focuses on driving traffic and improving rankings, you must ensure that these efforts contribute to overall business goals.
Successful organic optimization requires a holistic approach that transcends the full buyer journey.
By setting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and measuring performance, you can see how your efforts contribute to every stage of the customer journey, allowing for more targeted, responsive, and impactful strategies.
The five principles mentioned above are essential building blocks to future-proof your SEO organic strategy.
They are an essential bridge between the timeless principles of traditional marketing and the dynamic world of digital marketing, offering a framework to help you ensure your brand is set up for success regardless of the latest technological trends that impact search.
More resources:
Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock
Ben Wood is the Strategy & Innovation Director at Hallam, voted Best Large Integrated Agency at both the Global and …
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