Many marketers build their marketing strategy around the company’s vision, business goals, new product/service launches and available budgets. But what about (potential) customers? What are they really looking for? Let’s take a look together at how you can gather valuable information about them and refine your marketing strategy to make it “seo friendly” with maximum commercial impact.
1) How can SEO analysis contribute to the development of your marketing strategy?
Developing an effective marketing strategy requires a good knowledge of the company, its sector and its competition, a solid marketing expertise but also a good dose of flexibility, to adjust your strategy as you go along in a context of permanent change. The objective being to match supply and demand, you must take into account both the company’s value proposition and the customer’s expectations.
The most challenging part is often to collect external data to better understand these customer needs, seasonality, trends, etc. Different techniques exist: online questionnaires, interviews, focus groups… But beyond the high cost of these analyses, they only provide a fixed overview at a specific time and are therefore not very suitable for capturing trends.
This is where SEO analysis comes in as an interesting alternative.
Every day your (potential) customers search for products, services and information on Google. These queries are recorded by the search engine and are mainly used to better respond to future queries and for advertising purposes. However, it is also possible to obtain strategic information from these searches, and thus better understand the expectations, needs, frustrations or motivations of your prospects.
It’s as if you can penetrate the minds of your potential customers. The holy grail of any marketer. Unrealistic? Not so much…
Google Search Statistics (2021): 17+ Facts You Need to Know (firstsiteguide.com)
2) How to use this data?
Obtain data related to the key themes for your activity
With Google Keywords Planner (if you are an advertiser) or professional SEO software such as Semactic, you can obtain valuable data on the queries entered in Google. In the first case, you will obtain information on the search volumes (= number of monthly entries of a keyword in Google) and the level of SEA competition (i.e. the competition for this keyword at the level of paid ads).
Semactic also provides you with other important information such as the SEO competition (are there many websites that are positioned on the targeted keyword, and are they well optimized) and the SEO potential. We have developed our own SEO potential KPI based on search volume, organic competition and paid competition.
This data is essential because it allows you to know search trends, anticipate peaks in demand, understand the positioning of your online competitors and plan your marketing actions accordingly.
In our example, you can see when people are most looking for a property developer (“promoteur immobilier”) in Belgium. This shows us a peak in the month of June that could be interesting to capture via a communication, event or special action.
In the case of e-commerce, this information can even be used to anticipate sales and stock management.
But let’s go one step further, with categorisation by theme. If you associate keywords of interest to your business with different categories (“labels”), you can create a spider graph to visualise which theme is the most important to work on.
In the example below, we have analysed the strategic positioning of our competitors based on Google rankings. But you can do the same on the basis of keyword search volume, level of competition, SEO potential, etc.
At a glance, we see the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
By having this data for your different markets, you will benefit from a wealth of insights to feed your marketing strategy.
Here are some examples of questions you can answer with this information:
- What are my strengths and weaknesses in terms of online visibility?
- What is the potential (demand) for such products or product categories?
- What is the competition on these different products / product categories?
- When should we communicate and on which product/service
- Which products / services should we focus on?
- Which themes should I integrate into my content strategy for maximum visibility?
Keywords research : a key step in leveraging this strategic information
To achieve this result, the first step is to carry out a keyword research taking into account the specificities of your market, your website, your competitors and your SEO persona (“ideal” customers). This analysis allows you to identify the keywords for which your company can provide solutions or relevant information.
If you wish to fully exploit the potential of your keywords research, we advise you to identify at least 500 relevant keywords, this will give you a more precise overview of the key themes for your sector. You should also think about categorising these keywords so that you can sort them out and gain insights that are really useful for your SEO marketing.
Example of keyword research and categorization
There are various free ways to help you find interesting keywords. Here are a few of them:
- The best known: Google Keyword Planner (mentioned above) can give you ideas for keywords related to the ones you enter. However, you must be an advertiser yourself to access this information.
- Ubersuggest: provides you with the same kind of information as Keyword Planner, but the free version limits the number of searches and markets to be analysed (not available for the Belgian market, for example).
- You can also get inspiration from Google Autocomplete: suggestions provided by the search engine when you start typing a query.
In this example, when we type “promoteur“, Google suggests other interesting terms such as “promoteur immobilier Belgique”, “promoteur immobilier namur”, etc. These suggestions are based on your location, your search history and also the volume of related searches.
- Your competitors’ website. It may seem obvious, but it is sometimes forgotten: your competitors also position themselves on themes that may be of interest to you. Don’t hesitate to consult their site to give you new ideas.
- Finally, AnswerThePublic allows you to view the questions that potential customers ask on Google in relation to a given theme.
Do you use these insights in your SEO marketing?
You have not yet carried out an advanced keywords research to develop your SEO marketing? Would you like to take advantage of this wealth of information to refine your strategy and stand out from the competition? At Semactic, we carry out an in-depth analysis of your key themes that we integrate directly into our SEO software. This provides you with constantly updated, processed and formatted information to help you exploit its full potential.
