When audiences are trying to answer questions, choose between brands, and find the best prices, they usually turn to search engines. That’s why a search-first marketing approach is so critical for hitting your business goals. It gives your brand visibility and places you in the mix during the buyer journey.
However, search-first marketing doesn’t work without high-quality, tailored content. You need helpful articles, compelling landing pages, and enticing product descriptions to bridge the gap between your brand and your target audience.
In this post, I’ll explain why a search-first marketing approach, bolstered by top-notch, goal-driven content, helps drive the growth of your business across all channels.
What Is Search-First Marketing?
A search-first marketing strategy prioritizes organic search as a marketing channel, centering tactics around optimizing search visibility. You still use and attract customers through other avenues, but instead of treating each channel separately, you align them with your organic search strategy and create a cohesive digital presence.
This approach is a nod to the key role that search plays in the buyer journey. For example, audiences might discover your brand in a social post but head to Google to find reviews. They might recall your product weeks after they click a PPC ad and search for your business when they’re ready to purchase.
Why Search-First Is the Next Step in Digital Marketing
I like to think of search-first as a new chapter in digital marketing. Right now, businesses have multiple channels to reach their customers and plentiful data to guide decision-making. A search-first approach harnesses these strengths and gives your marketing efforts more focus and structure.
- By leveraging insights from search analytics and website behavior, you can make informed decisions about what your customers value and want to know.
- You can translate user insights into helpful, relevant content that you precisely tailor to your customer and their journey.
- You can then align other channels — such as PPC, social media, and email marketing — using your search data to better tap into your audience and drive traffic and conversions.
How Great Content Supports Search-First Marketing
I’m going to focus on how content fuels a search-first marketing strategy because the information and knowledge you share is a critical component of success. To boost your online visibility and engage your target audience, your content should be meaningful to your audience — something they want to read, interact with, and learn from. And if you can create blog posts, ebooks, videos, and other pieces of content that offer value, you can drive some pretty powerful marketing outcomes.
Content Enhances the User Experience
Once visitors arrive on your site, they need a reason to stay. This is where high-caliber content comes in, welcoming users with compelling conversation and an exceptional experience.
Encourage visitors to spend time on your site by answering their questions, solving their problems, and piquing their curiosity. Ideally, you have a solid inventory of quality, people-first content so your guests can navigate easily from one piece to another and fully address their needs.
A satisfying user experience leads to all kinds of benefits for your business. You begin developing connections with visitors and building trust, pulling them into your marketing funnel.
Engagement also reduces your bounce rate. If your content resonates and users stay on your site rather than immediately returning to the search engine results pages (SERPs), Google will perceive your content as relevant and may reward it with higher rankings.
Content Drives Organic Traffic
Each piece of content on your site is a chance to rank for a different keyword, helping generate impressions, clicks, and traffic. With a comprehensive keyword strategy, you can potentially appear in the SERPs for an array of search terms. You can target high-volume keywords that are important for your niche and long-tail keywords with higher conversion rates.
SEO content creation helps you attract a mix of customers who are searching for information about your product or niche. You can capture prospects who are early in their journey and exploring options, as well as those further along the path to purchase who are comparing features and brands.
As long as you keep an eye on search trends and update your pages accordingly, these optimized content pieces will give you a consistent presence in the SERPs and create a steady flow of visitors.
Content Establishes E-E-A-T
To rank well, Google recommends sites exhibit qualities it refers to as E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google uses these guidelines to determine the value of your content and to highlight sites that are reputable and established in their niche. Brands that can showcase E-E-A-T tend to be more visible in the search results.
Content is the best way to demonstrate to Google’s team of quality evaluators that your brand is knowledgeable and credible.
For example, you might show your experience through testimonials, case studies, or guides. You can highlight your expertise through ebooks, white papers, and blog posts that explore your niche in depth. Author bios, lists of awards, and trust seals also emphasize your reputation and authority.
Content Builds Brand Awareness
Bolstered by an inventory of high-performing content, your business will begin appearing consistently in the SERPs for a variety of related queries. Aim to deliver a superior user experience each time someone clicks one of your links to create positive associations with your company. Brand awareness is invaluable, as audiences:
- Become familiar with your name and logo.
- Recognize your brand as a source of expertise and knowledge.
- Gravitate to your links when they encounter your brand in the SERPs or social media.
- Spontaneously think of your brand when considering a purchase.
- Share your content, giving it more prominence.
Content Educates the Customer
If there’s one content marketing tip I’d like you to take away from this article, it’s this: Be visible and answer your customer’s questions at every turn of their journey. Helpful educational content furthers your marketing efforts, ensuring audiences gain knowledge and find solutions on your site and not on a competing one.
You can create different types of content to educate customers and draw them into your pipeline. Those looking for general information about your industry may be interested in blog posts, industry research, FAQs, how-to guides, checklists, and glossaries.
Audiences making purchasing decisions will appreciate detailed information about your products and services. To help them find relevant products, they’ll turn to detailed product guides, tutorials and demos, case studies, comparison charts, and interactive tools.
Content Prompts Social Sharing
Social shares are a valuable, low-cost way to amplify your brand and expose you to audiences you might not otherwise reach. If you can provide readers with compelling storytelling, witty insight, or informative content that matters to them, you could inspire them to distribute the piece through their own networks.
More importantly, social shares, comments, and likes enhance your overall credibility because they’re unprompted and come from third parties.
Social shares also further your marketing efforts by delivering impressions, clicks, and website traffic. Online interactions signal to search engines that your content is on topic and helpful, which in turn may improve your search rankings.
Content Supports Link Building
You might be picking up on a recurring theme by now. Many search-first marketing tactics hinge on showing Google that your website is credible and pertinent and merits recommending to users. Backlinks from authoritative sites are another important way to build your domain authority. Search engines view inbound links as a validation of your website — after all, if highly respected websites are linking to your web pages, there must be value in your content.
To land quality backlinks, however, you need superior content that others feel is worth a referral. Consider creating original research, product roundups, resource guides, and thought leadership pieces with opinions or predictions about industry trends. You can then use these unique assets to build backlinks, bring in referral traffic, and improve your authority for ranking purposes.
You can also partner with a link-building service to expedite the process.
Content Generates Leads & Boosts Conversions
This brings us to one of the biggest reasons to implement a search-first marketing strategy: the growth of your business. Well-crafted content that’s tailored to your audience can help you entice leads into your sales funnel and encourage online conversions.
The key to driving results is to map out content and provide comprehensive solutions. Anticipate what a customer may want to know next and guide them along the journey with appropriate calls to action. You might link to related content to keep visitors on your site, suggest they subscribe to a newsletter to stay connected, or take a quiz and get product recommendations. You can also create gated content, such as white papers and ebooks, that users can download after providing contact information. A thoughtful content strategy centers around your audience’s needs and helps you progress toward your marketing goals.
Content Reinforces Your Brand Messaging
Visual elements such as logos, colors, and typefaces help create an identity for your business — and so does your content. Whether audiences are engaging with your brand through your social media platforms, website, or marketing emails, each piece of content should stay true to your core values and messages. Your choice of language, tone, and phrasing helps audiences recognize and connect with your brand and distinguish it from competitors.
Establish guidelines for voice, style, and messaging to ensure your content meets these expectations no matter what touchpoint customers are using. Customers may find a mismatch, for example, if a luxury brand swaps its sophisticated voice for irreverent humor on a social media platform. A consistent brand presence helps you nurture relationships and encourage loyalty and return visits.
Content Generates More Consumer Search Data
And that brings us full circle. I started this article by discussing how search-first marketing is data-driven and emphasized the valuable insights your analytics provide. As you implement your strategy and begin driving traffic to your website, you’ll benefit from an expanded data set. For example, you’ll have a broader sample of visitors from various platforms and different types of content to monitor engagement.
Use this intelligence to gain precise insights about audience behaviors and your most effective channels and content. For example, you can segment data based on new and returning visitors, demographics, referral traffic, or geography. You can leverage these deeper insights to better calibrate your search-first marketing strategies and improve outcomes over time.
Power Your Search-First Strategy With Standout Content
The content you publish has the potential to boost your online visibility, improve traffic across channels, and generate leads and conversions. Schedule a consultation today with our content specialists at Victorious. Our SEO content writing services can help you put your search-first marketing strategy into action, generating long-term, sustainable results for your business.
