In a down economy, most companies will cut back their marketing investments in an effort to simply survive. We took a contrarian approach and have used the economic tailspin to rebrand our company and completely overhaul our website and its support infrastructure.
We also chose to bet heavily on search engine optimization (SEO), rather than using traditional and expensive brand marketing channels as the primary way to build and drive brand awareness. For us, increased brand awareness leads to more search engine traffic, and that traffic increases page views and impressions, which help to meet our advertising clients' needs. The following are some helpful hints that I would recommend to any marketer, brand or otherwise, when investing in your brand in the era of SEO.
1. Use SEO as a cost-efficient means of free advertising. Most marketers are still trying to wrap their arms around SEO -- how it works and why it's important. In order to effectively rebrand your company or product, you need to understand how you can use SEO as a means of free advertising to impact your site traffic and, ultimately, your brand. With marketing budgets down, especially traditional brand marketing budgets, SEO is one of a few channels in which you can build brand awareness while also driving direct response referrals. With more and more consumers using search engines to find what they're looking for, strong SEO rankings are a vote of consumer confidence, and that vote will help drive brand preference.
2. Do your homework. Like most marketing initiatives, rebranding in the era of SEO requires research and analysis. It requires deep knowledge and analysis of both your site traffic and your key competitor's traffic. The first mistake you can make is not using the analytics tools currently at your disposal to determine how to best influence the design of the new site. This involves digging into your site and your keywords and having a deep understanding of how your competition is currently positioned.
Using Google Analytics or other tools to measure and analyze your traffic is a necessary first step. Other tools are also great for monitoring competitors and garnering insights on what strategies they might be using to rank for certain keywords. As a first step, use your analytics tool to segment your site by entry page and view referrals coming from search engines. After finding out which pages (or groups of pages) are driving the most traffic from search engines, go to the next level and look at keywords. Come away with a list of pages and keywords vital to your continued SEO success. You'll use these later and ideally build upon that success.
3. Get involved in designing/developing the new site. Gone are the days of simply throwing things over the fence and letting the product development teams go after it. You (or somebody on your team) need to get involved in the design to make sure that the new site is not only providing differentiated value and user benefit, but that it's optimized for search engines. Navigation, hierarchy, URLs, and naming conventions should be decided with your input. You know what to fight for. Stand up and let everyone know if you have a premier placement in a search engine that will be at risk if it is drastically changed or if somebody wants to get rid of a feature that includes one of your top keywords.
For example, you should speak up if a copywriter is working in a bubble and changing language; after all, you know how people are searching. There is a business case for each of your keywords and landing pages, so make it known. Redesigning a site without this kind of input could kill the brand equity you've already established with the search engines, which could drastically decrease the traffic coming to your site. If possible, have a single individual or team focus on SEO during this initiative. Make sure that they're looking at keyword traffic religiously and that they're tying this traffic to revenue generation and constantly analyzing where competitors rank for those keywords. Without this knowledge, you're flying blind.
4. Don't cry over lost traffic. Since you're using analytics tools to check SEO traffic daily, you'll know immediately if specific keywords are losing traffic. But don't worry -- there are many things you can do to mitigate SEO traffic loss after the launch of a new site. For example, in some cases, the pages to your site that appear in search engine results may simply disappear. Or maybe that page has significantly dropped in ranking (i.e., from No. 1 to No. 200). If a page is no longer indexed despite all of your hard work to make it better, a 301 redirect can use the old page's strength and focus it on a new page -- that may improve rankings for a coveted keyword(s).
You can also email the owners of sites linking to yours and ask them to update their links -- maybe they will even add a new link to a new feature while they're at it. Finding links into your site is relatively easy. Using a tool such as Majestic SEO, you can easily identify who has linked to your site. Backlink Watch is another great tool to monitor links to your site.
5. Recognize the importance of links. The importance of having other sites link to yours and the impact on SEO rankings can't be understated. Links, especially good ones, reflect popularity, and popularity on the web is a huge vote of confidence in the value of your site.
Link-building starts with your competitors. By now, you should know what terms you want to rank for and how your competitors are ranking for those terms. Your competitive analysis should also give a good idea of what competitors are doing differently, from a link-building perspective. Use your competitors as a guide to help kick-start your own link-building efforts. Typically, the more authority a site has, the bigger the boost if that site links to you. Educational (.edu) and government (.gov) domains are known to have lots of authority, and sites with high page ranks (popular blogs) will also serve you well in your link-building efforts.
But keep in mind that good link-building is predicated on good content. You have to have a compelling reason for somebody to link to you in the first place!
My company chose to invest during this down economy in order to position us for future growth and to ensure we could meet both our consumer and advertiser needs. While the economy has certainly limited our marketing spend, it has forced us to focus on SEO over expensive traditional brand approaches as our primary means of acquiring customers and driving revenue. Based on our experience and success thus far, I'm confident that we'll continue to allocate most of our resources to SEO.
John Lusk is vice president of marketing at WhitePages.
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