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These notions about our awesomeness are kind of falsely affirmed by Google Analytics, which tends to focus on the last-click attribution.It’s OK to be the hero in your client presentations. Just don’t delude yourself.Search marketing, particularly when it comes to commercial queries, is often just reaching people already at the bottom of the funnel and ready to purchase.So what should we do?Search used to be a way to build a brand. But Google’s machine learning algorithms (RankBrain on the organic side and Quality Score on the paid side) are becoming pickier about which results they show.
This has changed search from a channel where you can just do demand Benin WhatsApp Number generation into more of a direct reflection of pre-existing preferences of the market.What we need is a more predictable and repeatable way to win business, so we’re not waiting on people to search for our stuff and just show up at the last minute in the hopes of making a sale.So how do we create value? What we should do is balance search marketing efforts with brand affinity and demand creation activities.Building brand affinity in organic searchIf you’re doing SEO, that means embracing doing off-topic content. So, in addition to going after the people who are looking for the exact commercial keywords you’re going after, you also want to go after higher-funnel queries (i.e., informational queries) that don’t have as much commercial intent but could bias a future commercial search toward your brand.Organic search is becoming increasingly a reflection of people’s brand preferences because of feedback loops. You may have never heard of Brand X, but if enough other people have heard of Brand X,

then it will have a higher average CTR — and a more prominent position on the SERP.That feedback loop always existed in Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) because of Quality Score. Big brands have had huge advantages thanks to brand affinity. People tended to click on ads from brands they knew.Now the same thing is happening in organic search. There’s a kind of feedback loop where brands you see in search now more closely correlate to the overall popularity of that brand.Be a UnicornBuilding brand affinity in paid searchNow, on the paid search side, it’s remarkably difficult to use the same strategy because of the Quality Score algorithm. CTRs (it will restrict your impression share and increase your cost per click).
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