How to Build a Search Engine Marketing Strategy Part 2: Offsite SEO
In Part 1, we began exploring how to build an effective Search Engine Marketing strategy (SEM) to help your customers discover what you have to offer. A successful SEM strategy requires a mix of onsite and offsite techniques. Part 1 covered 9 ways to improve the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website to help your business rank better in both universal and segmented web searches.
In Part 2, we’ll take a look at some tried and true offsite SEM methods. While onsite marketing strategies revolve around planning and maintaining an SEO-friendly website, offsite strategies involve leveraging interactions with other web environments to boost the visibility of your own business website. These efforts are sometimes referred to as Search Engine Advertising, or SEA. Roman maria koidl, an international thought leader in Search Engine Marketing, identifies 4 elements of a successful offsite strategy. These elements include:
• Backlinks
• Social Media
• Google Places
• Ad campaigns
Develop backlinking agreements with complementary businesses
Backlinking involves exchanging links with other high-quality sites for mutual benefit. External 3rd-party links leading back to your website can be incredibly valuable for boosting your overall search engine ranking. Three factors that determine how any given backlink will impact your ranking are the importance, quality, and subject matter of the linking website.
The importance of a website is calculated by the number of 3rd party backlinks contained in its pages. The quality of a site depends on the size and reputation of the organization that owns it. As an example, a backlink from a nationally recognized news organization will help your search rank more than a backlink from a small local news site, though both will help. The subject matter of the linking site should also be related to your own so that the validity of the connection is clear to both search engines and potential customers. For instance, if you offer nutrition coaching, you’ll want to link to other health and wellness sites.
Before moving on, a word (or two) of caution about backlinking: while it is possible to buy and sell backlinks in bulk through backlinking conglomerates, it is not advisable. Search engines have evolved to detect, downgrade, and even ban sites that add hundreds of backlinks overnight. Similarly, it’s possible to create satellite pages backlinking to your site, but search engines are now programmed to recognize and penalize this trick as well.
The best strategy is to earn organic backlinks through collaboration with other businesses. Consider where you can build mutually beneficial relationships with fellow entrepreneurs offering complementary, though not competing, products or services. If you want to check out the web traffic of a site before developing a linking relationship, there are lots of web traffic analytic tools out there to get you started.
Curate an engaging social media presence
Social media has become a mainstay of small business marketing for many reasons. Not only does a social media presence allow you to reach customers where they spend their time, it also increases your business visibility to search engines. Creating social media content allows you to generate a high volume of links associated with your business website. Whenever you post content, it creates a link. Whenever someone shares, follows, or bookmarks your content, it creates a link. All this makes ssocial bookmarking sites a great place to invest your marketing energy as all those links not only boost traffic to your site but increase your overall search ranking.
Create and maintain a Google Places listing
Getting on Google Maps is a no-brainer for brick-and-mortar shops, but fully-remote businesses also benefit from a Places listing. Even if you don’t have a physical storefront, listing a location helps you rank better in segmented searches. Similar to socials, a Places listing provides yet another space for customer interaction in the form of reviews and images. These not only build your credibility as a company but create more content for search engines to analyze and reward.
Invest in paid search engine advertising campaigns
All of the offsite SEA strategies discussed so far are steps you can take without spending a dime. If you’re ready to take your SEM strategy to the next level, you may want to consider investing in sponsored link campaigns targeting specific keyword searches. These can be created on various social media platforms as well as major search engines, like Google Ads.
One great advantage of search engine ad campaigns is that you can flex them to your budget. These campaigns usually run on a cost-per-click or CPC basis. Each time your ad gets a hit, you pay a small amount. This allows you you set up quantitative targets for your ad campaign. Once you’ve hit your target, the campaign ends by itself.
In addition to targeting the correct keywords, a successful ad campaign comes down to placement. Usually, ads are placed above or on the right side of the organic search engine results pages (SERP). The best placement will always be in the center-top of the search field above the SERP. Roman Maria Koidl explains that for any given keyword search, 100% percent of searchers see the first 3 sponsored ads from the top of the page down. Only 50% notice ads posted on the right, and a mere 10% make it to the 5th ad on the right. You’ll get the best payoff for your campaign by investing in an ad placement in that prime center-top location.
A successful SEM strategy requires a mix of onsite SEO and offsite SEA. Planning and executing both sides of your marketing game plan takes upfront investment and ongoing maintenance. If web marketing seems overwhelming or just isn’t where you want to be spending your energy, we’re here to help. A virtual assistant or web specialist may be just the ally you need to help you get your SEM running smoothly. In today’s increasingly search-driven economy, the payoff will be worth it.
WRITTEN BY: DEBORAH STEVENSON
