Why SEO Is Important When Developing Your Marketing Strategy?

Marketing strategy is essential to the success of your business, but a lot of business owners don't know where to start. It doesn't take a genius to learn the basics, but it does take time and knowledge of your market and customers.

Market research, segmentation, and targeting are all basic elements of any successful marketing strategy. Your marketing campaign should be designed to meet specific objectives that are central to achieving your business goals. In fact, a clear breakdown of the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) is enough to plan a compelling marketing strategy for any company.

SEO is not just for driving traffic to your website and spreading brand awareness — it is an invaluable tool for understanding your customer base and increasing customer loyalty. From analysing the keywords that potential customers are searching for to identifying the competitors that are stealing your market share, SEO analysis can provide crucial value in the earliest stages of market research and strategy planning.

When people need information, they turn to search engines. People search for everything from the best pizza places in town to the most popular podcasts, and search engines deliver. Google processes about two trillion global searches each year, with 65,000 searches being processed every second!

Your customers spend ages asking Google questions every day. It's a gold mine of information for your business. You can use that data to figure out what your customers want and how to improve your business. Google offers some great tools to help you do this - we'll talk more about these throughout this article.

How can SEO support your market research stage?

Marketers should always get a clearer picture of their target customers, whether through surveys, one-on-one interviews, or eye-tracking studies. Marketers can never know everything about their customers or potential customers, but the more that they discover, the easier it will be to tailor the right type of message to those customers.

SEOs are by nature, a curious bunch, with a knack for hypothesis-led research and testing. They're particularly suited to helping out with market research at this stage of the process. Rather than following rigid best practices, they think creatively about how to get their message across to the widest possible audience. That's the thinking that will power your next digital offering.

Your SEO team can help you reach your target audience with the most cost-effective strategy. Let's talk about that ...

Market research

Understanding demand

Market research is a necessary part of any business. Understanding your market size, consumer behaviours, and needs will help you understand where to aim the future of your business and how to best serve your customers. It's important to note that market research can be carried out at any stage during the business life cycle, but is especially necessary in the beginning.

SEO-informed keyword research is a crucial part of starting any new business or launching any new product. Search demand for a product or service can provide incredible insight into the viability of your idea. If people are already Googling related phrases and keywords, it’s likely that they’re looking for a solution to a problem or question you could solve.

A keyword analysis service, such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends or BiQ can be used to determine search volume and competition for a certain keyword or phrase, as well as suggestions for similar keywords to target.

Example Google Trends data for “SEO Agency”

Your product or service might not be one that people know they need yet, therefore, making keyword research less important, but this information is still very useful to see.

Competitor Research

SEO can help identify your competitors, even if you don’t know about them. You may think the brands you see the most are your biggest competitors, but these traditional rivals are not necessarily your search competitors. With every search query, every click, and every sale, you must be aware of who is trying to take away your customers.

While some businesses might be interested in competition on a global scale, more often than not, they want to know who their competition is in the UK. If you already have your top 10 (or more) core keywords related to your business, we can find out who your top 10 competitors are in the UK organically. Just contact us for a free SEO competitor audit.

Example SEO Competitors

It's important to start competitor research as early as possible. Not only will it help you to better understand your market, but it also provides you with time to plan, give you time to get a clear idea of your own brand positioning and offer, and allow you some breathing room between your own product launch and the launch of similar products from your competitors.

In addition to the search engine optimisation analysis of your website, SEO teams can also provide you with data on which branded search terms your customers are using. This allows you to look up your own brand name as well as competitor brands to see which comparison terms are currently trending. SEO teams can then dig deeper into the keyword analytics in order to gain greater insight into how customers view you and your brand against competitors.

Take popular CRM, Hubspot, for example:

Hubspot vs Competitors

Competitor analysis is a great way to discover your most direct competitors in the eyes of potential customers. By looking at what keywords and phrases others use, you can get a better understanding of how competitors are positioning themselves in the marketplace — and how you can do the same.

Reaching top organic positions is a tricky game — you can't just outrank your competitors by randomising your keywords. Instead, you need to identify the most relevant search terms and optimise your site around them. When analysing top organic competitors, we can get a clear idea of their high-value keywords (they should be in the top 3 or 4 positions on the SERP) and use them ourselves (if and where applicable).

We can use our research tools to analyse your competitor's websites and see which keywords they are currently ranking for. Let's go back to our example with HubSpot and take a look at the rankings for their competitor, SalesForce.

Keyword rankings for Salesforce

Gather a Sense of the Current Landscape

To get a sense of the current landscape, you can use Google Trends for business insights about your sphere of influence. By inputting keywords or topics relevant to your business, products and services, you can gain useful insights into how the interest in those terms has grown or declined over the years.

The below shows how the trend for searches for PPC, SEO, email marketing and conversion rate optimisation has changed over the last 5 years. We can utilise this data to figure out which of our services are most worth promoting and focusing on over the next few months.

Trends of Marketing Services

Understanding Related Content Questions

As well as using keyword research to understand search trends and patterns, we can also use this research to view the most common related questions to your primary keywords. For example, as a marketing agency advertising SEO services, we need to know what SEO related questions people are asking on Google. This will then form the basis for our content marketing (blogging, social media content etc).

Understanding How Customers Find Your Products Or Services

You might think that your product is referred to as X, but actually, your customers are searching for Y. Are customers searching for your products by name, or are they looking for something else? If you're targeting a generic term that is similar to your product name (and related to its functionality), it might be a good idea to make a change. With an optimised name and description, you'll be more likely to get found and can avoid potential headaches down the line.

Many companies assume that the names they’ve given their services or products — the ones already on their e-commerce sites or in print — are the ones that customers prefer most. Because those terms have been used in the business’s offices and marketing materials, they assume that these are the ones customers know and use. But it may be a different story out there in the real world.

It's important to understand how your customers speak and what they call your product. Use surveys, interviews, or marketing research to discover this information.

If your audience calls your product by a different name than the one you expected, look for ways to make this distinction even clearer. If you have multiple products that are similar, but not identical, consider a naming strategy that allows people to easily tell them apart.

Compare Your Website Content To Your Competitors

By comparing your website content to your competitors, you can ensure a few things;

• Ensure you’re covering similar pain points - explain what your service or product solves

• Ensure your content isn’t too thin - it should be long enough to compete on the search engines with your competitors. Don’t get left behind with content that is too thin.

• Ensure you’re coming for the keywords you want to be competing for - for example, you can’t expect a podiatrist in Manchester to rank for “podiatrist in Machester” if “Manchester” isn’t mentioned on the site (or isn’t mentioned enough, especially compared to your competitors).

SEO Lincolnshire Competitor Comparison

Use Your Initial SEO Research To Determine Market Size Geographically

Your customers are spread around the world. Technology has made it easier than ever to reach consumers in markets around the globe, and with search engines, it's become an inexpensive task. Conduct preliminary keyword research to get a sense of how much demand there is in other countries or areas of your country for your product or service. Then, you can use that data as part of your overall analysis of your potential customer base and determine the size of your market opportunity.

Final thoughts

Marketing executives should integrate digital teams early and often in the process for all projects, as they have a wealth of data about customers’ preferences, interests, and pain points.

If you’re a marketing executive, business owner, product distributer etc talk to your SEO team or agency and ask them to work with you on planning the next year’s strategy. Work out where they can be of help and how they can contribute to your strategy. Explain what you need from them (research, data, insights), so that you can take into account the crucial information that you need about the market.