Let’s Talk Research – Marketing Tips for SMEs

If you are one of the many businesses who has had trade impacted by the pandemic, you may well be wondering how you are going to get your business back on track once restrictions are lifted and the economy bounces back.

In 2021, Whizz Marketing launched a series of explainer videos to show businesses how re-evaluating their SEO & Marketing Strategies can help them to adapt to the new environment.

The first of the series is Let’s Talk Research.

Research is crucial to campaign success

Our new Let’s Talk Research video explains the type of research that will give you valuable insight, and an edge on your competitors.

Comprehensive research will help you to achieve your business goals:

• More targeted traffic
• More leads
• Higher engagement
• More sales

Let’s look at the type of research that will provide valuable insights to help you to make better informed decisions on how to adapt your campaigns and achieve better results.

Keyword Research

Brands need to consider how popular keywords might not have changed have since the pandemic, but the intent behind them may have.

If you keep up with the latest trending searches in your sector, it will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors. Looking at search trends shows you how search demand fluctuates for different search queries.

If you see a keyword with increasing popularity, this is one to focus your SEO efforts on.

For any that are declining in popularity, you may consider looking for alternative keywords that are similar, or perhaps you have noticed sales or interest in the product or service has dropped in recent months, in which case the question to ask is, should you still be investing in this keyword to drive traffic and sales if data shows there to be a significant drop in search demand?

Google provides a useful tool Google Trends. Another useful free tool offered by Google that can give you some new keyword ideas that are relevant to your business is Google Search Console.

You will need to have added a Google Verification Tag to your site for Google search data to display and over time you can use this data to gain further insight on the search terms people are typing into Google and for which your site is achieving clicks and impressions.

Some you may already have in your Keyword Strategy, but some may be new; keywords that you may not have even thought of that could be potential high traffic drivers if you were to better optimise your content for these keywords.

It isn’t, however, just search volume data that should guide you into deciding which keywords to incorporate into your keyword & SEO strategy.

It is also useful to get some insight on competitiveness of keywords. At Whizz Marketing, we also analyse target keyword’s bid competition scores which generates a useful Keyword Effectiveness Indicator score giving a great estimate of the effectiveness and opportunity that each keyword will present.

Competitor Research

Do you know who your online competitors are? Your online competitors are domains which rank for the same keywords you either rank for, or want to rank for.

They may or may not be direct competitors in the true sense of the word, but they are your competitors in Google search, which is where 92% of people go to find the product, services or information they are looking for.

Analysing and understanding how well your content ranks against your competitors, and how much brand visibility your business has is key to the success of any marketing and SEO strategy.

When we run a Competitor Analysis for our clients, we provide insight on up to 10 competitor domains on the following metrics:

• Average rank position for tracked keywords
• Average number of tracked keywords ranking in first 3 pages of search results
• Visibility scores for tracked keywords
• Backlink profile, including domain trust & authority scores
• Social media citations & level of engagement
• Dangerous competitors list which incorporates all domains that are competing on the same tracked keywords, some of which may not be known competitors, but ones to watch.

How well is your site performing?

Another research task to perform before adapting your SEO & marketing strategy is to understand how well your site currently performs and if there are any technical issues that may be holding your site back.

Running an SEO Audit and a Technical Audit will identify any issues and will provide insight on current level of optimisation, current ranking positions for tracked keywords, and level of trust and authority the domain has accrued. The Technical Audit will pick up issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, server and mobile optimisation issues.

A Website Analysis will also be useful to better understand your audience and how they interact with the content on your site.

Adapting your SEO & Marketing Strategy to the new environment
Regularly reviewing and adapting your SEO & marketing strategy is good practice and will help you to focus on the metrics that really matter to your business.

Conducting comprehensive research, re-assessing budgets and setting new KPIs to each platform will help identify strengths and weaknesses, and this insight will help you to achieve your marketing goals across all channels.
We will work with you to create a comprehensive and workable SEO & marketing strategy that adopts a variety of optimised approaches to ensure your brand gets found online and users re-connect with it, time and time again. Whizz can help your business get back on track. Call us on 01252 622129