Marketing is not a 1-trick pony
There are many business owners who live in the misapprehension:
If I can get to Number 1 on Google my business will succeed
This is a nice idea that quietly sidelines a number of important questions, such as:
- Do people really search for the term(s) where I rank #1?
- Are the people who search part of my target audience?
- Are searchers actually looking for the products/services I can supply?
- Does my website tell the right messages when people visit?
Many of you will know my mantra: Marketing is a process NOT an event. The ideas above demonstrate this. There are many elements you need to consider as part of a marketing process, and most of these or not ‘fit & forget’. They need regular work. If you do achieve high ranking on search engines, your position can slip. You need to keep your website updated. This means regular, new, relevant, engaging content. Furthermore, a business should market across a range of channels, using a range of tools. You should not rely on just one approach. Over-reliance on Google Search catches out many businesses every time Google updates their algorithms. This post from searchenginejournal.com makes interesting reading
Number 1 on Google within 24 hours
Right, I have had my say about not relying on any single marketing tool. Yet, at the same time, you should aim to get the best results from each marketing tool you choose. Let’s look at an example that happened recently for a client using Google Ads as part of their marketing mix. As with many BSA clients, their business is niche, targeting specific services to specific target markets. This sometimes presents a problem when picking target keywords for a campaign. If you select a fairly general keyword which gets lots of searches, it can need a high bid to get your Ad to appear on page 1 of rankings. Worse, most of the people searching won’t be looking for your niche product/service. As a result, you end up with the double-whammy of paying high click-fees for poor quality traffic. Obvious, I hear you say, don’t use general keywords. Instead, just target very specific terms that relate exactly to your offering. Arguably, SME businesses should (almost) never use general keywords. Better to target for highly relevant keywords/phrases. They will typically drive better quality traffic at lower click cost. Often this can be a successful strategy, one that we recommend and is used by several clients but sometimes even this falls short. A client of BSA currently uses Google Ads as one of their marketing tools. However, some of their services are very niche. This can present a problem.
SEO and YOAST to the rescue
If a keyword or phrase is so specific that not many people actually search for it, Google may decide that even though it is an eligible word/phrase, the search frequency is low to the point that they don’t feel it is worth displaying ads! This may be even though those few people who are searching are EXACTLY the potential customers you are looking for. This is exactly the problem faced by our client – and on the Google Ads platform, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. This problem meant we needed to think laterally. If the search term is so specific that very few people searched for it then maybe not many people optimised natural search for the term on their website either? Readers will know that we are great fans of WordPress and the Search Optimisation tools available with the Yoast plugin which proved its worth here too. On the client’s (WordPress) website we went to the relevant service page, checked Yoast was installed and fired it up. Setting our preferred (and v specific) search phrase, Yoast made several recommendations as to how we could optimise the page content. We followed the recommendations and adapted a couple of others until we were happy we had the balance of content that read well and a ‘Green Light’ from Yoast (Yoast users will know what I mean!) The final step was to publish our updated page and then wait for the Google Algorithm to do its thing.
The outcome
Past experience is that it can be at least a few days if not a week or more before changes get picked up by Google but this time it was quicker (perhaps because it was such a niche term?). The day after we posted the new content, our client’s website is ranking #1 for the search phrase we used. It is possible to get a #1 ranking on Google within 24 hours and it doesn’t need to cost a fortune. Now we just need to try to keep it there – but that is another story. Like I said, a process NOT an event.
