Limiting your organization to direct competitors only might lead you to a very narrow view of the market. This framework allows you to evaluate companies that aren’t just your direct competitors but companies that could easily move into your turf. You want to consider companies that aren’t currently in your category but could potentially leverage their product or technology in your space.
No, but you will need to have completed keyword research beforehand - and I mean thorough keyword research, not a bullshit download from Google Keyword Planner. You will need to have a handle on the competitive metrics for your target SERP's. If you have no idea how to get these, I strongly encourage you to also check out my course Master Keyword Research.
Strategy is more than a bundle of cultivated tactics. When we onboard a new client, we have a whole arsenal of tools to use and reports to run that help us understand the account better. It is easy for us to pat ourselves on the back and say “this is a good strategy for learning the account!” Pardon my language when I say: That ain’t no heckin’ strategy.
Hi Shashixx, there are some free or semi free tools out there. Some only free trial some free with some kind of limitation. smallseotools.com is one like that. You get maximum of 100 backlinks (but then again its free). You should also remember though that you get what you pay for. All these paid tools have lots of additional information or features that are valuable for improving on your seo. At the end i´d say they are worth their investment.
We must clearly identify our objectives for the campaign and tie the campaign objectives to business objectives. Your objectives could include raising awareness, increasing engagement, generating conversions, and customer retention. Your objectives will need to be tailored to your specific business and you will want to map your objectives to a typical marketing funnel. This chapter highlights how to identify your objectives to measure success.
Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. Far too often, I see organizations skip this important step and get right into keyword mapping, optimizing content, or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.
For example, it’s important to look at the response based on urban, suburban or rural locations. Someone living in northern Indiana may consider driving 25 miles to your store to be no big deal. Most customers or prospects could make the drive in less than half an hour and, therefore, they will visit your store. However, if the prospects live in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, they aren’t going to want to go to your store in Wrigleyville because that’s going to take 50 minutes.
xAd’s first step was to expand its use of location data. “We wanted to move beyond just the where, and use location data to define the who and the what of audience targeting,” Monica Ho, xAd’s CMO, told GeoMarketing in 2015. After all, while a consumer’s proximity to a Denny’s can be significant, targeting someone who has been to and enjoys their local Denny’s will often prove more successful — whether or not they happen to be near the restaurant at the time they see the ad.
This can mean simply using pictures from the surrounding area or structuring the landing page around a theme that is relevant. A great example of this is Grubhub. If you access their site from Boston, you get completely different suggestions and images than you do if you access it from San Francisco. Not only does this engage the user on a personal level, it also draws them in to the page, keeping them clicking for longer.
Unless you have a budget to conduct formal research, its best to use available resources such as news articles, industry journals, analyst reports, the company’s website, marketing collateral, company reports and so forth. You may also want to do a general blog search to find out what their customers’ and others are saying about the company and the products they offer. Networking events and tradeshows also present great opportunities to collect data about your competitors. Your more loyal customers may also share information with you.
2. Voice Search Comes into Its Own: It’s time to start optimizing your ads for voice search: The ease of use and prevalence of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, as well as Google’s Voice Search (“OK Google…”) make using vocal search utterly quick and convenient. Voice search accounted for 20 percent of mobile searches in 2016, according to a Kleiner Perkins study quoted by CNN. Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home are on many Christmas Wish Lists this year. Grab the voice searcher’s attention by using the first person question format in your ads and content. Most voice searches are geographically specific, so use correct and popular names for your local neighborhood(s), city, county, and region in your PPC ads.
Geolocation technology can also be used for planning virtual events or experiences that combine physical and virtual or augmented reality. For example, the Pokémon GO game was able to parlay geolocation into a great success. Advertisers can use the same strategy to develop virtual experiences around a brand or product. This can involve using geolocation at events to track attendees and deliver specific information that enhances their overall experience.
Competitive analysis is an exercise of comparing your business, product, and service to companies and finding similarities and differences. The most critical part of kicking off a competitive analysis is choosing the right competitors to analyze. Otherwise, you will spend tons of time on competitive research with very limited insight to show for it. In other words, the competitors you select determines how you will perceive your company and the final analysis.
You and your competitors are competing for the attention of potential customers. That’s why it's useful to know how your competitors use social media channels and paid acquisition channels to reach their target audience. While digital channels are key in today’s marketplace, you also need to pay attention to offline channels like events, meetups, conferences, and direct mail. This is where the face-to-face interactions occur that are often the key to establishing connections and sealing deals. You can usually find out information about offline events by visiting the “Events” section of your competitors’ websites and also searching for their names in relation to conferences and events on the wider web.
Your competitor analysis framework should give your stakeholders an overview of how the playing field looks. A side-by-side comparison with top competitors helps teams strategize better, plan business growth and provide a clearer vision for the organization. When creating a competitive analysis, you should first consider defining the criteria for the comparison. Common high-level pieces are company information, description, products or services, strengths and weaknesses and market-fit.
It’s important to remember that online shoppers are humans, and to treat them as such. The examples below show two versions of the same ad for a fake cyber security business. While version A does provide potential customers with information about the company and the services it offers, it fails to address them as people or speak to the challenges or pain points they might be experiencing.
This is the paid search strategy that is deployed most often by search marketers and for good reason: it focuses purely on maximizing the profitability of campaigns. For most of us, that is the reason why we continue to spend money with search engines, and why the industry keeps on growing year over year. We manage campaigns to maximize profitability and we don’t have to worry about budgets as long as it’s profitable. Or at least that’s what we hope will happen.
What is PPC (pay-per-click) marketing? Pay-per-click marketing is a way of using search engine advertising to generate clicks to your website, rather than “earning” those clicks organically. You know those sponsored ads you often see at the top of Google’s search results page, marked with a yellow label? That’s pay-per-click advertising (specifically Google AdWords PPC, which we’ll talk about below).
Geo-Targeting content is simple and beneficial to most websites, advertisers and publishers, as well anyone using PPC campaigns or SEO. Not only does it enable you to match the most relevant content to your visitor, Geo Targeting also serves as an excellent basis for experimenting with traffic to optimize your funnels. Some ideas were presented here that may be tested, but the options are virtually limitless.
When creating and implementing a digital marketing campaign, you first need to design your keyword strategy. This strategy is more than just finding keywords that will bring you the highest number of visitors. It’s a top-to-bottom concept that will influence how you design your site, select keywords, optimize your pages and measure the success of your campaign.
Overall score: Finally, you simply add up the scores and divide by the number of columns you have. This will give you an overall score. Then you can sort your keyword list by overall score and voilà, your keywords that are likely to perform the best for you bubble up to the top. You can weight each column if you like based on which factors are most important to you.
Stadiums, airports, universities, and malls are examples of specific venues that can be targeted in order to reach specific interest groups. Stadiums provide a great opportunity to focus on specific short engagement events with an audience defined by that event. They often host fans from two specific cities or schools or fans of a specific music genre that is heavy in one demographic. A band like One Direction, for example, is likely to attract school-age female fans.
Here’s where artifacts like user personas may come in handy. A persona should clearly outline what potential customers want and how they plan to get it. It’s your job to map their needs to content you create, using the list of keywords as a guideline for topics. That said, since they’re based on assumptions and not real user input, personas shouldn’t be a replacement for user research and testing. If your buying cycle is long and complicated, a customer journey mapping exercise could also help you identify wants and needs during individual steps of the cycle. Software service Autopilot HQ has a great post about how to map content to customer needs throughout their journey.
Informational: These keywords represent the very beginning of the conversion process, and are not very likely to convert on the first visit. If you’re running a branding campaign you’ll want to be sure to include informational keywords on your list. If you’ve got a conversion goal, you still can’t afford to ignore these keywords as they make up the majority of searches. Informational keywords often use words/phrases like "how to", “do I need” and “where to find”. Consider these leads to be converted later via your website or a retargeting campaign.
Say our real estate marketing business really starts to blow up. We make a few new hires and start to divide Manhattan up into regions, with each new employee responsible for a new section. Each one is responsible for marketing within their region. We can easily carve out an “excluded” area within any local awareness region to, for example, exclude a particular zip code that we’re not responsible for from our ad’s targeting. That lets us save money by not targeting customers that we don’t really want to be attracting:
It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these popular search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what's called the "long tail" of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, comprise the majority of the world's search volume.
Sometimes even the most savvy among us can feel like a confused great-granny on a MacBook Pro running Linux when it comes to the newest, latest tech, and how it actually works. Location-based marketing is already happening. All of the available tools provide opportunities to serve highly localized, highly relevant communications to your customers, based on where they are right now. But what exactly are those options, and how do they work?
L’Oreal did something similar when it used geolocation technology to create a virtual art exhibit that allowed attendees to uncover the art and feel as though they were right there looking at it. Brands can also use geolocation technology in mobile apps that include gamification aspects to engage a user more fully in a particular product or service.
It’s actually ideal to use just one keyword per ad group. This is known as a single keyword ad group (SKAG). Try using this strategy, even for large accounts, with 80 percent of keywords that get or you expect to get the most traffic. You should most definitely employ this strategy for keywords that are getting the dreaded “Rarely shown due to low quality score” warning.
If you have been dabbling in this PPC advertising thing and not noticed much traction, you might want to reconsider your budget. Many small businesses set a PPC spend that is too small to make any significant impact. Most people don’t realize that while PPC campaigns generate an average of 2% click-through, most do much better, especially with the help of new technology like machine learning.
Geo-Targeting allows you to run different campaigns in different locations. Your ads might be served all over the world and vary in their marketing message according to the segment and audience that you approach. Is the marketing message on your site the same as the geo-targeted ad? Experiment with sending traffic from a geo-targeted banner to a geo-targeted landing page (in language, currency, offer, etc) and to a generic page – what converts better?
Ad text plays an important role in the success of your ads. It is the form of marketing communication that advertisers can use to promote their product or service on search platforms. An effective ad text consists at least one of your core keyword, attractive discounts and promotion and a call to action. The quality score of your ad depends on multiple factors and your ad text is one of them. Your ad text should be unique and appealing. Include discount amount in your ad copy and also add a strong call to action that can compel searchers to click on your ads. Use action words like buy now, order now, resister today or sign up here. Include one of your keyword in your ad text and match your ad to your landing page.
In Google Analytics you can do this by using the same path we detailed before: Traffic Sources > Search > Organic > Advanced filter. Enter a specific keyword or use the RegEx generator to cover all the possibilities that you have in mind. Make sure that you create at least two advanced filter: one that includes all your branded keywords, and another one that excludes them.
Keyword Difficulty (KD). This is a cumulative score that shows you how difficult it will be to rank organically for this keyword. It accounts for the number of competitors within this space as well as the strength of those competitors. If one of your competitors is a government website that gets millions of visits each month, for instance, that will impact your difficulty score. Other factors that impact difficulty include the quality of content your competitors have and how relevant it is to the searcher. As a best practice, look for keywords with a difficulty score that's no higher than 80.
It’s easy to notice what your competition is doing wrong, but what about the things they’re doing right? In order to compete, you must dissect all aspects of your competition by completing a SWOT analysis. What are their customers happy about? What are they complaining about? Use this opportunity to dive into some qualitative competitor analysis. Go online and gather YouTube and Facebook comments, check out conversations on Twitter. If you can interact with your competitors’ customers face-to-face, go out and talk to them. You can use all of this information to your advantage.
It’s not easy to find information on market share. Large companies invest millions of dollars to investigate market share but most SaaS companies don’t have such resources. The best shortcut is to conduct a survey with a sample size of 200-300 respondents, asking them what tools and solutions they are using. That’s usually just enough to get a ballpark estimate of market share in the SaaS industry.
Attribution. Use attribution data to prove the influence of PPC on conversions either cross-channel or within the channel. For instance, you might learn that certain campaigns don’t convert well, and the instinct is to turn them off. However, if they lead to conversions in other campaigns, you’ll want to allocate budget to keep the conversion path open.