Once you’ve gotten your prioritize identified and confirmed, now comes time to dial in your strategy to own as much of the boardwalk as possible. Remember the main goal here is to build a list of commercially focused terms so you can off-set your cost of traffic acquisition via SEO. I’ve picked a fun local term (that personally I don’t care about, but that’s another discussion – if you really want to know why – shoot me a tweet) “seo services philadelphia” (f0r the purposes of this example I’ve scrolled down past the 4-pack of AdWords ad, and the map pack with 3 results). Let’s Look at a Local Professional Services SERP I don’t want to make this post about keyword research, but if you need a refresher on how to find and prioritize your most important terms (based on commercial value), check out my other post that is actually about keyword research. This just requires a bit of creativity on how to create assets to grab rankings in those SERP’s, remembering they don’t necessarily need to be assets that carry your brand. So looking at the above data we can see that “crm software for sale” is the second most valuable commercial keyword that we would want to be monopolizing for after “crm software.”Īnother big consideration here is that crm software while it’s the 800 pound gorilla, might just be too expensive to go after due to the level of difficulty – and instead it may make more sense to consider going after some of the “cheap” modifier keywords (even if you don’t sell “cheap software” AND you don’t want your product associated with being cheap). The goal here is to identify the terms where it would be most expensive for you to have to buy traffic versus rank organically and acquire that sustainable traffic for free, month after month. The cheat code here is to simply take your priority list of terms and multiply their average monthly search volume by their average cost per click, or if you’re a lazy marketer you can use KeywordKeg which will do this for you. If you haven’t built out a comprehensive keyword matrix to determine this, there’s a shortcut you can take using the commercial value of your priority terms. Identifying Your Highest Value SERPsīefore we get into how to monopolize your target SERP’s, the first step is to identify where your efforts should be directed to ensure you’re not investing in the wrong keywords. Instead, you need to own the opinions and awareness of every bit of that SERP and here’s where the SERP Monopoly Strategy comes into play. It’s not enough to rank your product or feature page somewhere on page one, diluted among a mix of results from directories, YouTube results, and review blogs. Hubspot is the highest ranked (organic) provider on this SERP (assuming you consider native English speakers scan left to right then top to bottom), likely sending them a steady amount of new leads. However, I’m willing to bet you HubSpot sees a fair bit of traffic (and conversions) from this SERP. Then if you take note of the 2 software brands that ARE actually ranking they’re Salesforce and Zoho – so in short you have no chance of ranking your brand’s website on this SERP. This SERP has 10 organic results that are NOT actual providers of CRM software (and 12 organic results overall), instead they’re review sites like Finances Online, Capterra, Webopedia, and Software Advice - or they’re publishers like PC mag, Business News Daily, Forbes, or HBR. The last point is the most important one. There are 7 ad units 4 on top and 3 below.There are SERP elements “People also ask” and “People also search for”.If you go check out this SERP, take note of a few important elements We see this most often in software verticals where SERP’s are comprised of a mix of providers, reviews, and directories, like this SERP for “crm software ” The practical application is that you may have to accept that to get traffic for the keywords you want – you need to be present on websites that aren’t yours. This is quite literally what RankBrain is all about. This means moving past the vanity of having your website URL’s ranking for your priority keywords, and instead accepting that Google ranks different types of content for different types of keywords and the current type of content on your website may not be able to rank for the terms you’re targeting. Like all things that are driven by technology, SEO is constantly changing and has reached a tipping point where to compete you need to own more real estate on the SERPs.
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