Have you ever wondered why big companies use AdWords on their brand names?
It’s simple: they don’t want to take any chances.”
One of the most common lines of resistance I encounter is, ‘We’re on page 1 already.’
At this point, I keenly enquire, ‘Oh for what keywords?’ and of course, the reply is more often than not ‘All of them.’ In my experience, the actual reality usually is one of two cases.
Case 1
When you dig deeper, you find that most of the keywords they rank for are their brand name (sometimes, this is the entirety of the searches), and a few generic keywords are next to no volume. There is nothing wrong with that if they are high-converting long-tail keywords, but more often than not, it isn’t. Their analytics broadly monitor searches for their brand-related searches. Again, there is nothing wrong with obviously gaining this traffic, but it’s missing the vast swathe of prospects who aren’t aware of your company but are aware of a need for your service. Even if you’re not mindful of the keywords that they’re using, that is the crux of the matter.
Case 2
There are, of course, occasions, where this isn’t the case, and a company, has some presence on some of the searches that are both valuable to them in terms of either volume or intention to buy. However, merely being on page 1 isn’t sufficient to win business. Why is this? Take a respectable search volume in the B2B field of 300 monthly searches. Sounds on the face of it that if you’re on page 1 you’ll get a good chunk to make it worth your while. Something to keep in mind is that today’s searches often involve a congested marketplace. Of course, Adwords usually takes up the primary real estate at the top of the page, but there may also be your local listings after this.
The attrition an organic listing can suffer can be up to 30-35% of the search volume consumed by prospects clicking on it. So now you’re down to about 200 monthly searches available after this attrition. A further issue is that just because a search was made doesn’t mean everyone will click on the first page. Some will make a search and carry on to the next second page and maybe click on it or abandon their search with no click-through at all. Again, you may also see more attritions from this.
It would be best if you considered your position on this page. The top three positions often bag around 60% of the remaining traffic. This now leaves just over a sixth of the original search volume to gain for the remaining seven positions. So, if you’re around position 9 or 10, you’ll be lucky to see about 5 click-throughs a month for what initially seemed like a very fertile search term.
So what’s the answer? First, you need to dominate any search phrase you know is valuable to you. Even if you’re in the top three organically, you must mop up as much traffic as possible that may only go as far as the Adwords or local listings section. This is why large companies will defend their brand position even in AdWords, not to allow a prospect to be swayed by a compelling ad made by a competitor.
Of course, when you’re a smaller organization, you may not have the luxury to dominate all search terms of value. Still, you can test and evaluate the terms systematically by undertaking selective Adwords campaigns and seeing what is generating business for you. In addition, there’s no excuse for any company to neglect their local SEO listings, which are frequently overlooked or mismanaged. Finally, you can argue for perhaps smaller volume but easier-to-dominate search terms where you may already rank that may benefit from some relatively simple page optimisation and content generation. After all, winning 30% of 10 high-converting search terms monthly is better than 1% of 300 generic lower-converting search terms.
If you need help adopting any of these strategies to be more effective with your search engine marketing, please don’t hesitate to contact me on 07985 676506 or e-mail me at guy@readysteadygoSEO.co.uk. Of course, all comments, opinions, and insights are welcome, and if you feel that this article may be helpful to other people you know, please don’t hesitate to share it.
