5 Marketing Principles To Future-proof Your SEO Strategy

5 Marketing Principles To Future-proof Your SEO Strategy

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.

Search Engine Optimization > Organic Optimization

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.

5 Marketing Principles to Future-proof Your SEO Strategy - a Framework showing the steps

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.

1. 3Cs Research

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

What It Is

Company research is about understanding your business (or your clients’ business) inside out. It should dig deeper into your internal understanding of:

  • Objectives – What you’re trying to achieve as a business, and how marketing can support.
  • Audience – Who you’re targeting and why.
  • Positioning – What makes your business stand out in the eyes of potential customers?
  • The market – What are the major challenges faced, and what opportunities do you see in the future?

Why It Matters To SEO Practitioners

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.

Examples And Benefits

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.

Tying back SEO objectives to marketing and business goals Image by author, August 2023

Customer Research

What It Is

This involves identifying your

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5 Ways To Drastically Improve The ROI Of Your SEO Strategy

5 Ways To Drastically Improve The ROI Of Your SEO Strategy
5 Ways To Drastically Improve The ROI Of Your SEO StrategyScreenshot from Pi-Datametrics.com, January 2023.

In the chart above, you can see that a “target” zone has been identified within Pi Datametrics Market Intelligence‘s Estimated Revenue Opportunity.

Content for these key terms is ranking well enough, but it’s currently sitting outside the positions that get the highest number of clicks (and ultimately, revenue).

Once you have identified this low-hanging fruit, it’s a great place to focus your efforts and optimize accordingly.

There are often easy fixes within this target area, for example, sorting out internal linking causing content cannibalization.

If you can also identify how much additional revenue you would gain from improving this target content; this will help you build internal business cases for getting technical website fixes into release cycles.

How To Capitalize On Medium-Volume Keywords

  1. Identify: Find and identify content where the opportunity has already been established and you have content that already exists. Look at the content you have sitting on pages 2 and 3 of Google.
  2. Prioritize: Focus on the terms with the highest revenue opportunity in order to see a quick impact on performance numbers and goals.
  3. Optimize: Once you’ve prioritized which terms to focus on first, go through each page one by one and optimize accordingly.

3. Optimize Your Content For Informational Searches

Optimizing for long-tail searches is key to capturing your audience at multiple touchpoints before conversion.

One of the best places to start is looking at the questions your audience is asking within the People Also Ask feature of Google search.

You can do this easily with Pi Datametrics People Also Ask Explorer, as seen below.

5 Ways To Drastically Improve The ROI Of Your SEO StrategyScreenshot from Pi-Datametrics.com, February 2023.

Having a good grasp and understanding of your audience’s intent can help inform your content so that it aligns with your customer and their needs.

Google’s People Also Ask feature is a really useful tool to get inside the mind of your customer and have a clearer picture of the content they’re searching for.

Use it to explore which questions on the SERPs relate to your product and key search terms.

Then, create and optimize your content so that you answer these questions and provide your customer with the information they’re looking for, before the point of purchase.

Our research suggests that if a customer views an “informational” page before a product page, they are more likely to convert, have a higher average order value (AOV), and also be a repeat customer.

Top Tips For Influencing Your Audience Before Conversion

  1. Utilize Google’s People Also Ask feature to get inside the mind of your customer and anticipate the queries they ask Google in relation to your product.
  2. Ensure your content is optimized to answer these queries, and if it’s not, think about adding new content to your strategy.
  3. Don’t forget about other SERP features. They all provide new opportunities to get your content in front of your customers and open more doorways to your site.

4. Maximize Opportunities From The Entire SERP

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Why Having A Person-1st Strategy to Web optimization Is Significant

Why Having A Person-1st Strategy to Web optimization Is Significant

In the research engine optimization business, we expend so a great deal time pondering about Google algorithms, sitemaps, and inbound links that we sometimes lose sight of the major objective: furnishing beneficial information to human readers.

In the previous, it was straightforward to realize why. You could cram your web page with key phrases, slap on a handful of meta tags, and voila! Your web page was on the very first web page of research engine outcomes.

Google rightfully recognized this wasn’t the greatest way to offer major-high-quality responses to lookup queries, so it adapted its algorithms. Evidence of Google’s desire in enhancing person encounter (UX) is located with updates like Panda in February 2011, Main Website Vitals, and other main updates that occur consistently.

That’s not to say you can wholly forgo factors of conventional Seo and that keywords and phrases no more time make any difference. Search engines even now acquire foundational Website positioning characteristics into account.

But organic and natural look for now also is dependent on applying a user-very first method.

So how do you do that? Listed here is a list of five methods you can consider to make your web-site more user-friendly, and with any luck , climb more up the look for motor benefits web site rankings.

1. Discover Structure Fundamentals

You don’t have to grasp the techniques of a graphic designer to increase UX, but possessing a much better knowing of the concepts that comprise a good style is an critical instrument to keep in your instrument belt.

Understanding these principles will permit you to make decisions that will give your site’s end users a superior knowledge, circulation a much more normal movement, and generally enjoy making use of your site extra.

When on the lookout into design lessons, make absolutely sure you are likely to be performing with a professor/instructor who can describe the psychology at the rear of what they’re educating you.

Understanding the psychological influence of style and design is the most important factor of what you really should be mastering – the “why” behind what you’re placing in put – so your conclusions have the wished-for result on your users.

2. Tackle Present Consumer Suffering Factors

If you are working with a web-site that has currently been all over for a when and you’re concerned that you’re managing into consumer issues, really don’t be worried to use details to your advantage.

The to start with place you should really begin is Google Analytics. Assuming you have this established up accurately for your website, you can ascertain precisely the place users are dropping off your web site.

You may well uncover it handy to established up warmth mapping and recording.

Warmth-mapping computer software provides you the ability to see exactly how people are interacting with your pages.

Some devices even allow display screen recording, so that you have a initially-hand look at of how users are transferring via your web page – and what’s halting them from

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Baseline analysis for your SEO strategy

Baseline analysis for your SEO strategy

Every campaign must begin with comprehensive research.

From making sure that your initial benchmarks are correct to performing an in-depth competitor analysis, you must make sure that your data is accurate and complete from the start. 

  • How is your site currently doing? 
  • What keywords are you ranking for? 
  • What keywords are your competitors ranking for?
  • How many links does your site currently have?  
  • What backlinks do your competitors have?
  • What errors does your site have from a technical standpoint? 

Launching an SEO campaign without gathering this data is like scuba diving at night without a headlamp. You will have no direction and can end up anywhere, possibly inside a shark’s mouth, instead of at the top of Google results.

This next section will go over various data points and where to get this information. For all of these data points, we use Semrush or Google products.


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Benchmarking using Google Analytics and Google Search Console

If you already have Google Analytics installed and acquire data, you can get various data points by clicking on Audience Overview, Acquisition Overview and Audience Benchmarking.

There are numerous tutorials on understanding Google Analytics, and most of the data is simple to understand.

If you are a Google Data Studio user, you can create a report to track and benchmark your data using one of the available templates.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

All-in-one Search Console template

Google Analytics Acquisition overview

Once you have explored Google Analytics and Google Search Console and have created your benchmarking reports, we can start analyzing data from Semrush.

Bird’s-eye view of your site’s benchmark report

We’ll start by getting an overview of how the website is currently performing. The following screenshot shows the Domain overview report in Semrush:

This report provides a variety of data points about the site’s current health, including: 

  • Organic search traffic
  • Paid search traffic
  • Backlinks
  • Top organic keywords
  • Top paid keywords
  • Total number of keywords that are ranking
  • Indexed pages
  • Keywords by Intent

You can click through this report to get more detailed information or export this report to get an overview of all of your initial baseline data.

Next, we’ll create an actual report to download with custom data. 

Create a baseline report

For this report, we’ll use the Semrush reporting feature.  

In Semrush, create a project for your site. Start by running a site audit. Once the audit data is complete, create a new report. Here’s an example of a baseline report template: 

Example report

You can use this template to create your own and use the Quick Modify to switch out the URL.

Organic research

Go to Organic Research and type in your website domain. The following organic research report will be generated:

Pay close attention to the numbers under Keywords, Traffic, Traffic Cost and Branded/Non-Branded Traffic. These are great metrics to track as your campaign progresses.  

Here’s what they mean:

  • Keywords: The number of keywords your site is ranking for in
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9 Essential Steps In Building A Winning SEO Strategy

9 Essential Steps In Building A Winning SEO Strategy

Online shopping has taken over the world.

While people still run to the store to pick things up, the allure of buying just about anything from the comfort of your home is unstoppable.

From plumbing fixtures to pizza rolls, if you want it, you can get it delivered with the push of an app – without leaving the house.

And even if your business sells services, rather than products, there’s an incredible chance that the majority of people are shopping for it online.

This means ecommerce should be a focus for every company that’s selling something. And that means you need an increased focus on web traffic.

After all, you could have the best website in the world, with cutting-edge design, optimized for ideal user experiences, and copy that would make David Ogilvy gnash his teeth in envy, but if no one ever sees it, it’s not doing you an ounce of good.

You need to get found. And that, of course, is why SEO is a crucial part of any modern marketing plan.

You want to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs), so you get found organically by your targets.

However, this is much easier said than done. But don’t fret, we’re here to help.

Whether you’re an experienced professional looking to brush up on the fundamentals for a client or a complete newbie trying to figure out how this whole SEO thing works for your business, you’re in the right place.

Here, we’ll walk you through the steps of creating, implementing, and optimizing an SEO campaign that will have your site shooting up the rankings in no time.

What Is An SEO Strategy?

You’ve probably already figured out that an SEO strategy is your plan to make your website or landing page more appealing to Google and other search engines

The goal here is to rank higher and drive more organic traffic (and hopefully conversions).

It sounds simple enough, but there’s a big catch: Search algorithms are always changing.

As Google seeks to enhance the quality of its searches and provide users with better solutions to queries, its algorithms are updated several times a year.

What that means for SEO is that you can’t just set it and forget it. Every search engine optimization needs iterations.

You need to regularly analyze and course-correct to ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest best practices and strategies.

That’s good for SEO professionals – otherwise, we’d be out of jobs rather quickly

But it means a bit of a commitment for you.

To stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the world of search, you need to regularly consult with reliable sources (like this one).

Luckily, there are a wealth of resources you can mine for quality information. Whether you prefer articles, webinars or podcasts, there’s SEO content available for you.

Do You Really Need SEO?

Right now, some of you contrarians are sneering at your screen and asking if you really need SEO to find customers.

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