AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

One thing we’ve found over the years is that companies often lose out by neglecting the online search market in favour of less effective streams of traffic. Many manufacturers don’t know which marketing methods or digital strategies will work best for their goods. Consequently, they tend to waste a sizable share of their marketing budgets on methods that just don’t work.

For example, consumers rarely use social media when searching for particular products. The vast majority of customers do exactly what you would do – they use Google search to see what is on offer. This fact flies in the face of the vast budgets companies often pour into promoting new products on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. You would be surprised at how much money is spent on methods that just don’t produce the results. However, once your products and brands are well-known to the general public, they do play a part in keeping your brand and products in the public eye.

Just because Coca-Cola is able to create generic ads that market their brand on social media, via event sponsorship and on TV commercials, doesn’t mean you should do the same. If you are responsible for marketing a brand new beverage, then copying Coke would be a disaster. Remember that Coke had spent decades visiting many cities across the US and explain to the world what their product was, why it was so good before embarking on a plan to convince countless stores to stock their drink.

Only years later were Coke able to benefit from expensively branded commercials and marketing campaigns that announced “Coke is it” or that it is “the real thing”. Copying consumer products that are way ahead of you in terms of brand awareness and public perception is sure to fail – despite your marketing agency’s best (but naive) efforts. In short, you need to build up to this level, one step at a time.

How can you get a good foothold in the market? Well, one of the most effective ways to get lots of visibility for your relatively new consumer products is by achieving high rankings on Google – in terms of both the natural and paid search results. This is how our clients have enjoyed greater visibility and increased engagement. It has also boosted sales in a way that allows them to grow organically.

However, to grab the higher rankings you can’t simply add a bunch of target keywords to your site and hope for the best – especially when the competition is so strong. Gaining a better understanding of how Google works will help you make the most out of the online search market. At Albion we always make sure our clients know what we’re doing and why, so the benefits of that knowledge can continue to inform our team in a way that allows them to complement the specialist search optimisation services we provide.

For example, if your firm specialises in children’s toys you’ll probably already have all the obvious words such as “children” and “toys” in your page’s content and metadata. However, you also need to include a number of modifier keywords (modified variations of your target keywords) such as “kid“, “child“, and “toddler”. This helps Google understands the semantic meaning of your web pages, and works far better than outdated techniques such as “keyword stuffing”. Don’t just chuck the same words into the text over and over; Google knows what you’re up to.

Furthermore by including the all-important “modifier” and “qualifier” keywords (to work alongside your product’s name and other related keywords) we ensure your product pages rank in the search results for a whole lot more search queries people use. It is often a real revelation to consumer brands when we point out that their web pages lack essential keywords such as “buy“, “online“, “shop“, “store“, “offer“, “new“, “best” and a range of other words people are known to use in their search queries when looking to buy new consumer products online.

If you’re aiming for a top natural ranking on Google for keyword phrases then these kinds of basic SEO keyword strategies are essential. Clever internal linking methods can help too, by channelling the “ranking power” of each target page. We can help you or your marketing team by providing invaluable keyword research data and exploiting that intelligence by optimising your product pages in a way that returns the best results.

These keyword strategies will help your pages in Google’s organic search results. This, in turn, will also reduce the cost of every click when it comes to paid search results, i.e. Google Ads. Without recourse to pro PPC tools you probably won’t know how much your competitors are bidding on keywords in their Pay Per Click advertising campaigns. However, by being smart with keywords you can achieve a better “quality score” that ensures you achieve a higher position for the same cost or the same position at a lower cost. This and many other online advertising best practices allows you to free up some of your budgets to invest in other methods known to convert that increased volume of online traffic into sales.