You’ll need to consider search, digital, voice, and omnichannel strategies when planning your approach.
I had the pleasure of moderating a sponsored Search Engine Journal webinar presented by Benu Aggarwal, President and Founder of Milestone Inc., and Bill Hunt, President, Back Azimuth Consulting.
In the last 20 years, search has evolved significantly. Search is now about complex conversations across different devices. But now, it was designed to reward websites that are helpful to users. The Google algorithm used to be designed to combat spam, but it has been updated to reward websites that are helpful to users. Now they’re aimed at enhancing user experience.
It is important to change how we are approaching search as it is becoming more conversational. We have been trained to type in abbreviated queries such as “restaurants,” “pizza,” or “Thai food” when we are looking for something nearby.
People are moving back to voice search because they have questions that need to be answered. SEO professionals need to be able to understand the subtleties.
Essentially, what Google’s BERT does is to improve its understanding of the context and meaning of words used in searches, and to identify more relevant results for those queries.
Marketers need to develop a plan to own the shelf space at Google’s SERPs and through other channels.
Steps in Creating Digital Strategy
1. Find Searcher Intent
Do you have the resources (e.g. financial, employees, infrastructure) necessary to meet your customer’s needs? If not, start creating them. Due to the increasing popularity of voice search, it is now more important to focus on broad topics rather than individual keywords.
Some of the most successful content is the kind that is built around themes that your audience is already interested in. If you can focus your content around those themes, you will be more likely to succeed. There are a couple of ways to discover what potential customers might want. You can consult search engine optimization tools to see what sorts of things people are looking for online, or you can talk to customer service representatives to get feedback directly from the people who use your product.
What are the types of questions that your clients and visitors ask every day about your store, location, hotel, and destination? These questions capture voice and natural search queries.
Design your pages and content around the questions that will be most relevant to your users. Be sure to provide answers that are informative and helpful in solving your customer’s problem.
Your content should be focused on your user, not just keywords. Keywords are still important, but they shouldn’t be your only focus.
2. Align Digital Assets with Content Strategy
We need to view all of our assets from the perspective of our customer. The content of our assets must correspond to the type of content that customers actually need.
3. Focus on Entity Search
Google is making decisions based on entities, so it’s important to take advantage of them.
An example of this would be how schemas on bank websites can help increase online product sales. A bank is not only a financial institution. The company has many different financial products, each with its own distinct features.
If you use schema and align your pieces correctly, you can see a 20-30% increase in your organic traffic.
4. Get Ready for Voice Search
The best way to improve your natural search ranking is to start gathering your frequently asked questions and creating content to answer them. You can then publish this content across all of your channels, such as chatbots.
This will be helpful in preparing for more voice search queries in the future.
5. Leverage Critical FAQ Data Across Multiple Platforms
Marketers need to use technology to automate tasks so they can focus on providing a real customer experience.
There are solutions that address the changing landscape of search where more and more consumers are searching using personal assistant devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa.
For example, Milestone provides a platform for businesses to manage all their Frequently Asked Questions for voice search. The following text can be paraphrased as: The queries can be sourced from Google, Bing, Yelp, and SEMrush. These are all great places to start when trying to find the right keywords for your business.
Milestone’s platform has a dashboard where you can create queries and manage answers. It allows for collaboration. It can also be used to feed the FAQs to your website and also to chatbots and to Milestone’s Voice Actions Platform.
When you have figured out the five steps above, you can start looking into what is available locally. If you want to improve your ranking in local search results, you should focus on optimizing your GMB listings. Enhancing your listings could give you a significant boost in results.
6. Have Accurate & Enhanced Information Across All Channels
The accuracy of a business’s NAP data is important for their success in local markets. That is still true in today.
We can improve our digital presence by using a platform that allows us to store all our business information in one central location. This same set of information can then be easily published to other digital channels.
If you want your business to do well locally, it’s important to have consistent data and enhanced listings.
7. Optimize for Traffic and Get People the Right Answer
Answering FAQs with a personal touch is especially effective for users who are using a voice device. It’s all about being that right answer.
8. Saturate SERPS and Universal Results
To dominate Google’s SERPs, you need to make sure your content matches the search intent in all formats. The key to success is to make sure that the needs of the users are met on all devices.
9. Aim for the Best User Experience
Most SEOs (search engine optimizations) only think about SEO (search engine optimization) when they should be thinking about engaging with the user through all channels.
Your website should demonstrate:
- Authority
- Sound technical SEO
- Relevancy
- Speed
- Clickability
After addressing the above, you can further enhance the experience through newly optimized assets:
- Make callouts to relevant service information.
- Include galleries and packages.
- Include schemas to all technical information related to venues, facts, etc.
- Include videos: use content from YouTube Channel and identify content opportunities.
10. The Right Answers Can Be Monetized
The right answers you provided can be monetized. Monetize your questions with links to ecommerce events, etc.
11. Holistic Strategy Across All Channels
We need to create a comprehensive strategy that matches your business goals to the SERPs. You will need to decide what impact you want to measure before choosing a channel.
12. Define Your Goals
The Chief Marketing Officer of a large global nonprofit was looking into investing in a digital strategy and recently asked for my opinion on the matter. I inquired about the top three aspirations she had and she replied that their only objective was to put an end to global hunger.
Well, that’s… admirable. To ensure that your goals are effective, they must be achievable and measurable in the short and long term. This way, you can determine whether or not your actions were successful.
Do you want to increase online donations by 25%? Would you like to get 10,000 new signatures for an online petition? Would you like to increase member engagement by adding them to your e-mail distribution list?
Be sure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and have a set time frame. Identify your top three goals. Write them down. Repeat them over and over again. This will guide your strategy.
13. Develop Audience Personas
The first step to creating a story that your audience will connect with is understanding who they are. Doing this requires a little more than brainstorming.
How many personas should you create? If you want to attract and target a variety of people, you should create 3-4 different personas. A persona should include information about a person’s background, career, values, goals, reservations, and decision-making tendencies.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry. You don’t have to come up with this on your own.
While it’s important to do market research to understand your audience’s demographics, it’s also important to interview them directly to understand their needs, wants, and pain points. This can include interviews with individual customers as well as online surveys in order to get a fairly accurate idea of who you are marketing to.
Create your personas. Post them on your wall. Name these fictitious individuals. Talk about them like you know them. Because you do.
14. Create a Journey Map
Once you have ascertained your target audience, you can proceed to mapping out their journey.
Mapping out your journey will help you see how people are already interacting with you online, as well as what other kinds of interactions could be possible. You’ll want to start with these questions:
- Where does a user first encounter your organization online (or offline)?
- What touch-points are the most important when a user makes a decision?
- What makes them leave and what makes them come back?
If you want to create a detailed journey map, it is important that you have a good understanding of your audience and their habits and behaviors. The more detail you put into your journey map, the more flexible your digital strategy can be.
15. Identify Key Channels
This is where we start to get into the details of digital strategy. The vast number of social and digital channels can be overwhelming, with new ones appearing all the time.
Many organizations believe that they need to have a presence on every social media platform, but the truth is that you should only be where your target audience is. Leave Snapchat alone if the person you’re trying to contact is not on the app.
If you want to reach your target audience on Facebook, part of your strategy should focus on organic and paid reach.
Matching your target audiences to the platforms they use most will allow you to reach them more effectively. Then overlay these engagement channels onto your journey map. It will make your content look nicer and give you a better idea of what kinds of things to write.
16. Develop a Content Strategy
We are in the age of content marketing because users engage most with what is useful to them. Is your content useful?
Craig Davis, Founder of Brandkarma, believes that companies should try to align themselves with what consumers are interested in, rather than interrupting them with advertising.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to content. Research what your audience desires and innovate methods to give it to them.
People follow what is popular, and respond to what is considered appropriate. If you want to be successful, you should focus on having high-quality products, being consistent, and being able to customize your products.
Outline the content types that would work for each target audience, and then group them accordingly. There may be some duplication of content, which is not a problem; the result will be a beautiful tapestry of information.
The campaign can be adjusted to be specific to a month, quarter, or season, depending on how comprehensive it is and how many resources are available.
17. Draft a Content Calendar
Although the digital space is moving quickly, calendars are still popular. In other words, you can’t achieve your goals without the right tools.
A digital strategy that is effective likely has multiple channels, content formats, deadlines, and deliverables. If you can keep track of that, you’re halfway there, but it shouldn’t be something that slows you down.
A effective content calendar includes a variety of different elements, such as benchmarks and major industry events, as well as listing the staff who are responsible for creating, approving, and publishing each piece of content.
It’s helpful to draft a calendar in detail, using project management software or a color-coded Google Spreadsheet. This can prevent workflow problems during busy times.
18. Plan Your Resources
When making a plan, take into account the staff and resources that you have available, rather than the staff and resources that someone else has. Many organizations overlook the importance of this principle, but it is crucial to developing a successful digital strategy.
Analyze the amount of time, money, and manpower you have available to invest in your project to create an effective strategy. If we implement this strategy, not only will it be beneficial, but our employees will also be happier and less overwhelmed.
19. Simply Measure
There is no shortage of data in digital marketing. There are many analytics platforms offered by various major companies, as well as many third-party platforms that offer a variety of data reporting.
Before you make any decisions, go back and look at your goals. Then you’ll know which numbers to look for. You will be able to see what is working and what is not working once you have numbers and this will give you actionable insights.
Did the blog series attract new subscribers? Did the email campaign bring in new donations? Did that promotional Facebook campaign sell more products?
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