AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

Over the years we have found that product marketing often errs by neglecting the online search market in favour of less effective streams of traffic. Many companies are unsure about which marketing methods or digital strategies will serve them best. Consequently, they tend to waste a sizable share of their marketing budgets on methods that just don’t work.

For example, customers rarely look on social media sites when searching for particular products. This fact flies in the face of the vast budgets companies often pour into social marketing of new products and brands. However, the vast majority of customers do exactly what you would do – they Google it. Though this might seem obvious, you would be surprised at how much money companies continue to funnel into channels that just don’t produce the results they expect. Only later, when your product is well-known does social marketing have a real effect and strong ROI.

Our clients enjoy more visibility for their product brand and greater engagement on Google by achieving higher rankings in both natural and paid search results – via search engine optimisation (SEO). But attaining a high rank on Google requires you to do more than just add a couple of target keywords to your site. When the competition in the product marketing sector is so strong that simply won’t work. In order to properly harness the online search market, you or your marketing agency will need to get a better understanding of how Google works. This is one of the ways in which we can help.

For example, if your firm specialises in sports goods you’ll probably already have all the obvious words such as “sports” and “equipment” 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 “sport“, “sporting“, and “sportsman“. This is a great way to ensure Google understands the semantic meaning of your web pages. It works far better than outdated techniques such as “keyword stuffing” whereby the same keywords are inserted into the text on your pages over and over again. No one likes hearing someone repeat themselves, not even Google.

In the above example you would also be well advised to include qualifier keywords such as “buy”, “online” and “shop” or “store” – as well as other phrases related to the product in question. This will help your web pages rank for a larger number of “long-tail” search queries. This also allows your page to qualify to be listed in the results for a whole range of related keyword phrases that you may not be aware your search market uses.

Basic keyword strategies are essential for getting top natural rankings on Google for keyword phrases. Clever internal linking methods can help too, by channelling the “ranking power” of each target product page. A checklist of effective keyword phrases is often one of the most important things a marketing agency can ever gives your team. At the very least, it will help them understand how much money they are leaving on the table by neglecting to optimise your pages properly and make the very most out of all the work that’s already gone into posting content on your site.

These keyword strategies will help your pages fare much better in Google’s organic search results. This, in turn, will also reduce the cost of every click when it comes to paid search results. Of course, without pro Pay Per Click advertising tools you probably won’t know how much your competitors are bidding on keywords in their PPC advertising campaigns. But with clever use of keywords in your landing pages, ad copy and target paid search keywords, you can achieve a better “quality score” which means your Google Ads will get a higher position for the same cost or the same position at a lower cost. This potentially frees up a share of your budget to invest in other methods known to convert this increased traffic into online sales.