Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

Phrase Targeting

Every SEO effort requires investment and hard work.  Success will come from focus and relentless promotion of the best you have to offer.

 

The first step is to identify the search terms or concepts that are critical to your brand message.  As we began, start with the core competencies of your company.  What are the critical intellectual property (IP) advantages that define you?  Your brand needs to represent these advantages and project these when your customers think about you.  Based on that foundation, your task is to come up with the 400+ concepts that reflect your brand and products.  Start small, 20-25 terms is sufficient.  Decide what pages on your web site are the best landing page for these concepts.

 

If you don't have an ideal page for one of these initial 25 concepts, something is seriously wrong with the previous work.  If one of these concepts has no home, create one.  You want to have one clear target for every search concept.  All of your campaigns and communications should lead visitors to this page and contact cycle for this concept. 

 

Now that you have identified the destinations for each of these concepts, reinforce this concept on that page.  Highlight this concept in the title of the page and the URL if possible.  Repeat this concept in as many appropriate ways as you can in this page.  All campaigns and promotions on this concept should reinforce this term and reference this target page.  Publish these reference links at every touch point and document that you have for this topic or campaign.  Do this and you will find your pages at the top of the Google search results for this concept in every case.

 

Now that you have your target pages and your terms, monitor your rank on these terms on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.  This core 25 is the heart and soul of your brand.  You have to win these battles. 

 

One final tip that I have discovered since the dominance of Google in the search business.  Top organic rank cannot be achieved unless you invest in buying Google adwords promotions for these terms.  Google's rankings depend on relevance, click through rates, and as we covered before, the quality score or "votes" delivered by all of your peers on the web.  The problem is that there is an entire industry of web sites that are dynamically created based on the paid search result in Google.  These sites harvest the results from Google on popular search terms and they turn these into navigational web sites and landing pages of links.  These links are subsequently crawled by Google in their search indexing.  That is accumulated as "votes" to your site and magically, your organic results improve.

 

There is no one at Google to ask if this is really true and any employee that I have pointed this out to shakes their head and says this is not likely but I have seen this in practice over the years.  If you do the work on your competencies and fix your foundation so you have the best target in the world for these competencies and lots of links from useful reference sites to your content and you do not see movement in the rank on the Google search results, then begin a targeted paid search program on these terms for a period of time and voila!, you will see that your pages will begin to climb the ranks in the organic Google results.  Magic how the money primes the pump.

 

I do strongly advocate doing the work on the foundation content first.  Distribute this to your channels, create your promotions, and build out your site, but if after all that you do not see improvement on your core competencies, pay the piper and magically you will see your rank climb.

 

Once you get established organically, you will not have to continuously invest in ad campaigns to stay there but it will help if you intermitently continue to refresh your ads.

 

 

 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

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