{"id":314,"date":"2020-09-16T11:25:11","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T15:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/digitalmarketingdraft\/chapter\/planning-for-a-digital-marketing-campaign\/"},"modified":"2023-01-23T10:10:19","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T15:10:19","slug":"planning-for-a-digital-marketing-campaign","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/digitalmarketing\/chapter\/planning-for-a-digital-marketing-campaign\/","title":{"raw":"Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign","rendered":"Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign"},"content":{"raw":"

Overview<\/h1>\r\nIn this chapter, we discuss how to use keywords to create pages and content that respond to consumers\u2019 needs and goals and how keywords can help us understand how our competitors are positioned online. We start with a brief introduction to search engine optimization<\/strong> (SEO) and why SEO is important online. We then turn our attention to ranking factors in order to emphasize why designing pages for people, by keeping people\u2019s needs and goals in mind is what makes pages rank high. We then cover customer-related, firm-related, and competitor-related implications of SEO.\r\n
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Learning Objectives<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nUnderstand SEO and keywords, and why they matter for your firm, for consumers, and for competitor analysis.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n

SEO<\/h1>\r\nSEO is \u201cthe process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine\u2019s unpaid results\u201d (Wikipedia<\/a>). This differentiates SEO from the use of paid ads in order to appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Take the following two screenshots, for example (Figure 3.1<\/a>). On the left-hand side, we have paid results that appear at the top of the SERP because the company has bid on certain keywords used in a search query (in this instance, \u201ccar rental montreal\u201d). On the right-hand side, we have organic search results that appear because the company has practiced SEO on similar keywords. In other words, they have optimized certain pages of their websites to maximize the chances that these pages would rank high when people search for specific keywords (e.g., \u201ccar rental montreal\u201d).\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_740\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1238\"]\"Search<\/a> Figure 3.1 Paid vs. Organic Search[\/caption]\r\n

Why is SEO Important?<\/h2>\r\nPeople use keywords to interact with content online, and most online experiences start with a search (Forbes 2017<\/a>). As we will soon see, people turn to search engines for a wide variety of reasons, and these reasons provide opportunities for your firm to show up when people are searching for something.\r\n\r\nRanking high in search engines also confers a competitive advantage. In 2015, the first spot on Google received 35% of the traffic for a specific search. More than 50% of the traffic went to results located on the first result page (Advanced Web Ranking 2015). Search matters for physical stores, too, and local searches lead 76% of mobile visitors to visit stores within the day. Of those visits, 28% resulted in a purchase (Google 2016<\/a>). SEO also matters because most people ignore paid ads (User Centric 2011<\/a>). Clearly, ranking high can benefit a firm: Being well ranked provides a clear advantage over competitors.\r\n\r\nIn order to understand how to rank high, it is important to understand how Google works. Let\u2019s watch the following video from Google:\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs[\/embed]\r\n

So, How Do You Rank High?<\/h2>\r\nThe main job of a search engine is to serve results that best address people\u2019s search queries. Let\u2019s say you want to know how to clean your cat. You have questions such as what kind of soap to use, how warm the temperature should be, and how you should wash their paws. You can turn to a search engine to answer these questions. People turn to search engines and use search queries<\/strong>, the \u201cquery based on a specific search term that a user enters into a web search engine to satisfy their information needs\u201d (Wikipedia<\/a>). For example, you might turn to Google and type in \u201chow to bathe my cat,\u201d \u201ceasiest way to wash my cat,\u201d \u201cwash a cat,\u201d or \u201ccat wash soap.\u201d\r\n\r\nWe will use the term keyword<\/strong> to talk about the key terms people use in search queries. Keywords are central for digital marketers. They are what we use to both talk to search engines in order to \u2018tell\u2019 them what search query a specific webpage is supposed to respond to (and we are going to see shortly how to do so), but it is also what we use to talk to consumers and make sure our webpage shows up when they search for something. Keywords link consumers\u2019 search queries and whether or not our webpages show up when they search for something specific. It is thus important for us to think ahead when creating pages about what are the keywords and search queries this webpage answers? <\/em>\r\n\r\nThe search queries above all use slightly different keywords, which might indicate that they are looking for slightly different things: the first user seems to want a tutorial, the second an easy way to wash a cat, the third is rather undefined, and the last one is more specifically focused on soap. As a result, search engines will deliver slightly different result to best address what they think the person wants in terms of information (i.e., what exactly they are looking for).\r\n\r\nThe role of search engines is thus to deliver the best result possible for people who are making a specific search. Thus, in order to rank high in search engines, you need to create pages that best answer specific search queries. <\/em>\r\n\r\nYou do so by creating specific pages for specific search queries. Each page should have content that best matches that query and keywords that are, ideally, perfectly aligned with the query you believe people will be making. This reflects the importance of representing (and understanding) the customer; your pages need to address questions, needs, wants, and challenges that people have. In addition, you should ideally write about topics you are knowledgeable about (or an expert in), on which your site has authority, and your information should be honest, accurate, and trustworthy. This is summarized in the EAT acronym<\/a> (expert, authoritative, and trustworthy).\r\n

Understanding Search Algorithms to Rank High<\/h2>\r\nAs shown by the video explaining how Google works, there are more than 200 variables that are taken into account when ranking websites. Some of them, though, are more important than others<\/a>. Namely, we can identify three broad categories of highly important ranking factors (Figure 3.2<\/a>):\r\n