Transform Your Marketing Plan With a Search-First Strategy

Hi, everyone. Welcome to SMX, and thank you all for joining me today. I’m Christina DiSomma, and I’m the Director of Marketing at Victorious, an SEO services agency.

I’m really excited to be here talking with all of you today about the power of a search-first strategy and how you can transform your marketing plan to boost your brand’s online presence and ultimately drive more leads, traffic, and conversions.

So, a little bit about me — my background is in inbound marketing. I helped brands across a number of industries boost their search visibility through both paid and organic campaigns before arriving at Victorious, where I started as our inbound marketing manager, and where my current role as director of marketing has me driving Victorious’ own search-first approach.

We’ve got a lot to cover today, so let’s get started.

What We’ll Cover

Today, we’re going to explore what makes a search-first strategy, and we’ll delve into the advantages of building your marketing plan around organic search. We’re also going to identify the search engine insights that are going to help you transform your marketing plan into a search-first strategy and discover how to analyze and harness those insights to determine what you should be targeting and how.

Then, we’re going to touch on the other half of a successful search-first strategy, which is creating effective and engaging content. We’ll explain why great content is critical to capturing the attention of your target audience and improving your search rankings, before bringing it all together to talk about how to align your marketing plan to your search-first strategy.

Finally, we’ll dive into the experiences of a brand that has been highly successful in applying a search-first approach and analyze their lessons learned for driving sustainable growth.

To start, let’s take a look at where we are and how we got here.

The Evolution of Marketing

Before the digital marketing era, marketing was largely based on assumption. Marketers would make assumptions about the audience and their motivations and then would use those assumptions to try and design messaging that would resonate.

The advent of digital marketing brought data into the picture, which ended some of those assumptions. But digital marketing has another drawback. It still largely revolves around a series of individual channels, and there’s a really limited understanding of how those channels interact with and impact one another.

Now we’re in the era of search, and the marketing landscape has changed again.

Search is a part of our lives. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you google things almost before you even realize it. How long should I cook this salmon for dinner? Or what’s the best pair of shoes for trail running? And the same is true of your potential customers.

Search might not kick off every customer journey, but search is certainly a factor in every journey. When we look for products, we use Google to discover our options, to compare pricing, to search for reviews, all the way up to pulling the website up to purchase.

Search-first marketing takes advantage of this reality. It places search visibility and optimization at the center of your marketing efforts, to help you appear where and when your potential customers are looking to buy. Aligning your marketing channels to your organic search strategy is going to help you increase your online presence across all of those channels and attract qualified leads, ultimately driving more conversions and revenue.

Now that we’ve defined a search-first strategy, let’s dive into some of the benefits.

Benefits of a Search-First Approach

The first benefit of a search-first strategy is that it is data-driven. This approach really shines by its ability to harness and interpret user insights to your advantage. Because you’re starting out with a data-driven foundation, you’re going to craft a strategy that is both informed and agile. It’ll bring forward shifts in search trends and consumer behavior that are going to help you adapt to the changing needs of the market.

It’ll also provide important insights into new problems your potential customers are facing and how they’re talking about those problems, which highlights additional opportunities for new products or services, and creates avenues for growth.

The second benefit of a search-first approach is that it highlights the value of quality over quantity. There’s no more scrambling to maximize page count. Instead, you’re going to take a much more nuanced approach, investing in high-impact content that truly resonates with your audience and provides value. We’ll talk more about how to create this kind of content later on.

The third benefit is that a search-first strategy offers a much better understanding of the individual channels.

Think about your current marketing efforts. For instance, do you know what percentage of your organic traffic is branded vs. non-branded? And if one segment or the other declines, do you have a good understanding of the impact that’ll have on your revenue?

A search-first strategy is going to help you better understand these kinds of metrics and determine when you should take action based on insights. By putting your organic data first, you’re going to better understand what’s happening in your marketing campaigns and communicate about them a lot more effectively.

Let’s take a look at an example: 

We collaborated with a cosmetics brand that was heavily invested in paid social, like a lot of cosmetics brands. And this team was unhappy with the ROI on their paid social ads, which to them didn’t really appear to be driving any business.

When the time came to reallocate their marketing budget, they reduced spend on these ads. But, unfortunately, when they did that, they were unpleasantly surprised to find that their organic traffic, which was driving sales, also dipped significantly.

So what happened here? 

Their marketing team was evaluating each channel in isolation, which meant that they lacked a comprehensive view of how their marketing expenditures were influencing their overall business.

Contrary to the team’s belief, these social media ads weren’t actually really effective, just not in the way that they’d anticipated since instead of making immediate purchases after seeing an ad, viewers were returning to the site later through organic search and making those purchases then. When the ad stopped serving, that brand awareness fell, and the organic traffic fell, too.

If this brand had implemented a search-first strategy from the beginning, they would have had a better understanding of how their search traffic was influenced by activities happening across other channels, and they might’ve made more informed decisions when reallocating their marketing budget.

Now that we’ve explored the components of a search-first strategy and explained the benefits of this kind of approach, let’s look at how you can transform your marketing plan.

Transforming Your Marketing Plan Into a Search-First Strategy

You’re going to need to do a lot of fact-finding and data analysis, but a little investment in these steps now is going to pay off big dividends in the future.

Investigate Your Current Traffic

Before you start, you need to understand how your current organic traffic breaks down.

Take a look at your current click-throughs. How many are coming from branded searches versus non-branded searches? Knowing this is going to help you in a couple of different ways. One, it’s going to reduce the likelihood of making false conclusions about your data. Two, it’ll help you prioritize which terms to target.

Let’s dig into this for a minute. Understanding branded versus non-branded traffic means you’re going to get a sense of how many of your potential customers have encountered your brand previously through another channel, as opposed to finding you for the first time through an organic search. So someone who’s arriving on your site from a branded query obviously has to have heard of your brand before performing the search, and it would be really easy to look at this as free traffic.

But in some cases, it’s absolutely critical to continue to target these branded terms through an organic strategy. For instance, if you’re working with an ecommerce brand that has a well-known product, failure to maintain rankings for branded terms surrounding that product could allow a competitor to swoop in and take a prime spot.

On the other hand, non-branded traffic represents potential customers who are searching for a solution to their problem, but who have not yet been made aware of your brand. And for some brands, this is a scalable source of potential customers that can be captured by a strong organic strategy.

Of course, you’re always going to have some brands that need a balance of both. There are branded terms that are critical to maintain, but there are also some real opportunities across the non-branded terms for them to capture more of the market.

There’s an important point to be made here — and we’re going to keep coming back to this throughout this presentation — which is that your search-first strategy ultimately comes down to your goals.

B2C organizations are going to have very different business KPIs than B2B brands in many respects. They’ll have differences in sales cycle, audience targeting, and so on. And a brand that’s trying to grow as fast as possible or break into new markets is going to need a strategy that aligns to those goals. That strategy is not going to be the same one that’s successful for a brand that wants to improve customer retention or capture a bigger share of their existing market.

This is where you, as the marketing leader, come in. You’re going to need to decide if it makes more sense to prioritize certain branded terms, to focus solely on non-branded terms, or whether you want to try and find a really good balance between the two.

Determine How Your Pages Are Performing in SERPs

Once you understand the breakdown of your current traffic, you can get into your investigation, starting with your website content analytics.

Here are a few key questions to answer:

1. Which of your pages are ranking really well right now?

2. Where on your site is the majority of your traffic going?

3. And how likely is that traffic to convert?

Now I want to make a really quick note here about the conversion rate of certain terms or pages.

Conversion rate is important, but it alone is not sufficient to drive your overall organic strategy. You probably have some pages that have a really high conversion rate, and it otherwise might make sense to target them. But they may not offer much room for expansion because they’re already quite optimized for the terms that you’d like them to rank for. This is something to keep in mind as you work through the rest of your analysis.

4. Finally, how do each of the pages you’re investigating fit into your overall marketing strategy and the customer journey?

If you can answer questions 1, 2, and 3, you’re doing really well. I would say that of the organizations that work with us, the majority have a good handle on number 1.

Generally, a big part of starting their engagement with us is getting a handle on numbers 2 and 3.

But question 4 is really what takes this strategy to the next level. And this is another place where you as the marketing leader are really going to be able to make the difference.

Take a look at each of your pages specifically and investigate the details from a human perspective. How do each of these pages you’re investigating fit into your marketing strategy? How do they fit into the overall customer journey?

You also want to take a look at the pages that aren’t performing well and really analyze the content on the page because it’s possible that there’s some misalignment and intent between the keywords that you would like these pages to rank for and the content that’s actually existing on the page.

Search Intent and Your Web Content

Let’s take a small detour to talk about search intent, which is a really important thing to consider when you’re investigating your content metrics.

There are five different kinds of intent.

First, there’s informational intent. In these queries, users are looking for information, whether that’s something small or larger, more complex questions. Then you have navigational intent, which helps someone locate a specific website or web page. You’ve got your commercial intent, which helps users research specific products or services. And these pages often lead to transactional pages, where users complete a purchase.

Finally, you may also have some pages that have local intent, which describes products, services, or information relevant to a specific location. These are the pages that are going to help you rank for terms that include phrases like near me. This type of intent is not just for brick-and-mortar businesses. B2B, ecommerce, and other types of businesses can take advantage of terms that have local intent.

Take a look at the search intent for each of your pages. Does it align to the terms you’d like the page to rank for? If not, you may need to optimize the content on that page.

Identify Which Terms Are Driving Traffic

That wraps up your content investigation. Next, we need to take a look at search terms and answer these questions:

• Which terms are you currently ranking for?
• Which terms are you not currently targeting but you could easily target with just a few small tweaks to your existing content?
• Are there terms that you’re not currently targeting but that you could target if you just had the right net new content?

And finally, take another look at search intent, but this time from a query perspective.

• Are the terms that you would like to target aligned with page content?

A quick note about metrics. Metrics like search term volume are going to tell you a lot here, but we often say there’s no better way to understand what’s going on with a particular term than to actually do a search for it. So before you really narrow down your final list of terms, make sure you’re checking out those SERPs.

Prioritize Your Areas of Focus

Once you’ve completed your investigation and you understand how users are currently finding your site through organic traffic, you know which pages are performing well and which aren’t, and you can identify some additional search terms to look for, it’s time to identify your areas of focus.

Your strategy should really boil down to this:

Where is the most potential for growth between your pages and your search terms?

A great way to pinpoint this is by calculating potential click-through rate, which is essentially going to tell you how many additional click-throughs you can expect if you choose to target a certain page or certain terms. Use this metric to guide your understanding of which pages should be targeted in your search for strategy and which you might want to deprioritize and come back to later.

Which leads me to another key point: Don’t try and focus on too many pages at a time. If you try and optimize everything all at once, it’s likely you’re going to find that you’re not optimizing anything very well at all. This is a really, really easy trap to fall into. You feel like you just can’t narrow down that list of pages any further, but you can always return to the pages that you choose to deprioritize. Stay focused now, and you’ll be a lot more successful than if you try to spread your efforts across too many pages at a time.

You also need to set KPIs for search based on the potential you’ve identified for traffic growth. So how much traffic can you expect to see? And how does that translate into your leads, sales, or revenue?

The final step is to align the KPIs that you’ve set to your overall marketing goals. You already know the high-level goals that you need to achieve. It’s really just a matter of figuring out how your organic traffic maps to those goals.

Helpful Tips

As you’re prioritizing your areas of focus, there are a few things to remember.

Number one, and perhaps the most important, is to be open-minded. Don’t make assumptions about your content’s potential. There might be pages that are not currently central to your marketing efforts but that represent a big opportunity. Perhaps these pages target a subsection of your audience that you traditionally haven’t targeted directly, or you might believe that there’s not sufficient customer value to optimize those pages, but the data could reveal something entirely different.

This is particularly true if you haven’t conducted any kind of search analysis recently. Search and buying trends do change over time. And what you previously deemed not worth prioritizing could now make a potentially significant impact on your business.

On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that there are some pages that don’t immediately align with your goal, and also don’t present enough opportunity to warrant your focus. Make sure you’re really checking your assumptions at the door and digging into the data with an open mind.

The second thing to remember is that data is critical to a search-first strategy, but search-first is not just about having access to the metrics. You also need to make those metrics meaningful. You can use metrics to narrow down your list of pages and terms to prioritize, but don’t consider it the whole story. This is where you, as the marketing leader, are going to be able to contextualize what you’re seeing to the opportunities highlighted by your data in a way that no one else really can.

To return to the same point we made earlier, it’s the same when you’re putting this strategy into action. You can leverage all manner of SEO tactics or search-first tactics and you’re going to achieve some level of success. But to truly take your marketing efforts to the next level, you as the marketing leader are going to have to connect the dots between those tactics and what is an effective overall strategy. And you’re going to need to communicate how those two things are connected to others in your organization, whether that’s leadership or to your own team.

Finally, you need to keep your search-first strategy up to date. As I mentioned a second ago, if you haven’t already run a search analysis recently, search and buying trends change. Search-first is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. It’s an evolving strategy that’s going to need to adapt as the needs of your target audience change — and as search itself grows, including updates like AI overviews. Keeping this strategy up to date is going to help you reprioritize as you optimize, swapping out pages that are now ranking well, for pages that you can continue to make improvements on.

The Role of Helpful Content in a Search-First Strategy

Now let’s take a step back and talk about the other half of optimization, which is high-quality, search-optimized content.

Your pages need to do more than just target the correct keywords. They also need to provide engaging, helpful content that delivers the information that users are seeking.

Google recognizes the value of this kind of engaging content, so much so that they’ve increasingly built it into the algorithm. As I’m sure most of you know, in 2022, Google rolled out the helpful content system, which prioritizes helpful, reliable, people-first content. Since then, they’ve made a number of tweaks to the system, and as of the March 2024 core update, Google has officially made the helpful content system part of its algorithm.

This really highlights just how much value Google is placing on people-first content. If you want to rank, you need to write things that are not only good for search engines, but that are also really helpful to the user.

Boosting E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is a great cornerstone for understanding and creating this kind of helpful content. While this is not a ranking factor, Google utilizes the concept of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to help search quality raters assess the effectiveness of its algorithms in surfacing that kind of quality content. That’s because it ties directly into what users resonate with, which is trustworthy, first-hand experiences. It’s part of why reviews, for instance, are so integral to the buying process. Generally, people want to learn from those that have experience in the subject areas they’re searching for, and they want to know if the person who’s writing knows what they’re talking about.

By writing high-quality content, you’re really positioning yourself as that authoritative and trustworthy source with the experience and expertise needed to help the user find what they’re looking for.

Of course, creating this kind of people-first content does not mean you need to sacrifice your search optimization. Ultimately, it’s all about writing clearly and concisely, which isn’t just good for Google, but for the reader as well.

Bringing It All Together: Aligning Your Channel Strategies

Now that we’ve talked about pinpointing your opportunities for growth through a search-first strategy, and we’ve touched on the importance of high-quality content, let’s bring it all together by applying your strategy to channels outside of organic search.

If you’ve hit this point, you should have a group of pages that you feel really confident targeting through organic search and some idea of how to optimize the content on them to reach and resonate with your potential audience. Let’s take the next step and apply it to your marketing channels and your marketing plan as a whole.

Frankly, this is where most people get stuck. Even I’ve gotten stuck with this step in the past in trying to apply a search-first strategy to my marketing plan at Victorious. The real key here is to reframe how you’re thinking about your marketing channels.

Remember that we talked earlier about digital marketing and how it’s often treated as a collection of separate channel strategies. A search-first strategy starts with your site as its own channel and considers how each of the other channels supports it. Some might drive traffic directly to your site, others might drive traffic indirectly by raising brand awareness, but the goal is to explain the strategy and intentionality of each of your marketing efforts.

So you’re confident in your search-first strategy because you’ve put in the work to investigate the metrics, and you’re sure of the potential for success. Now, you just need to take those areas of focus, and consider how each of your channels is supporting the pages that you’re choosing to target.

You also need to take a look at the pages you’re choosing not to prioritize immediately and those that it may not make sense to focus on at all. You know the purpose of each page, and you know that some pages are not designed to attract users, but rather to help them journey down the funnel.

You’re going to be in the best position to know how to measure each page’s performance, and know when anomalies arise that should be investigated. For those pages that you’re not targeting with your organic strategy, how are they being targeted across other channels, and what does that mean for your overall understanding of your website traffic?

Search-First Strategy: A Success Story

Let’s take a look at a real-world example of a search for a strategy. We worked with a law firm that aims to help car owners who purchase lemons in various states get money back for their defective vehicles.

We analyzed their current site content and did a competitive analysis to identify industry-appropriate keywords. Ultimately, we prioritized content pages that focused on long-tail keywords associated with specific vehicular issues.

This is a really great example of marrying in-depth data analysis — in this case, identifying the pages and search terms that had good opportunities for growth — with an excellent understanding of the marketing strategy of the customer. We posited that individuals facing problems with their vehicles are likely going to search for those vehicles specifically, making a long-tail strategy the most effective for capturing qualified traffic.

This strategy paid off. It boosted the firm’s organic presence and captured better quality leads that the legal team was able to qualify much more efficiently.

Now, It’s Your Turn

Now, it’s your turn to transform your marketing plan.

You already have a marketing plan in place and high-level goals that ideally map to an overall business strategy. Your next steps are to analyze your current website content metrics and search performance, and use the opportunities revealed by this analysis — plus your own marketing knowledge — to choose your strategic areas of focus. Once you have those areas of focus, you can start optimizing your content and creating new content where it’s needed.

You also need to identify which KPIs are critical to measuring the success of your efforts across each of your marketing channels. You’re going to need this in-depth understanding of each channel’s contribution to your search first strategy for the last piece of the puzzle, which is communicating the success transformation clearly across your organization.

Resources

Before you go and transform your marketing plan, I do want to share some resources with you. Ideally, these content downloads and blog posts are going to help you as you take the next steps in implementing your own search-first strategy. If you’re looking for more inspiration, that last download includes a number of different stories of brands that have successfully leveraged search-first strategies with Victorious.

All of these resources are compiled in the right-hand sidebar, and they’re also going to be linked in this presentation deck, which you can also find in the right-hand sidebar

That’s all for today. Thank you so much for joining me. Please feel free to reach out at the email address listed in the deck if you have any questions or if you want to talk more about aligning your marketing plan to a search-first strategy.

I’ve also included Victorious’s social links. We’re always a great follow. I hope you all enjoy the rest of SMX and have a great day.

• Find Success With Search First Presentation Deck
• Building Brand Awareness With a Search-First Approach
• Start Writing People-First Content