Could Your Company Benefit from a Search Engine Marketing Consultant?
As we move toward an online-first world, having a website has become crucial for companies. However, it’s not enough to simply have a website – you have to make an active effort to ensure people can find it.
According to a survey from 2022, 99% of customers use the internet to find information on local businesses. Because of this, every company makes efforts to rank better so customers find them first.
That’s where search engine marketing consultants come in – they help you rank better in the search engine results page (SERPs), improving your traffic and leads.
In this article, we’ll discuss whether your company would benefit from a search engine marketing consultant, and how.
Let’s get started.
What Is a Search Engine Marketing Consultant?
A search engine marketing consultant or company works with businesses to improve their website’s SEO and pay-per-click (PPC).
SEO alone can help you rank better in the SERPs. However, even the top result is overshadowed by ads.
That’s why it’s equally important to rank in PPC too, especially if you depend on leads.
Similar to SEO, there’s also a tug-of-war in PPC results. Either you can pay more to get your ad up top or you can organically drive better returns with a PPC strategy.
Search engine marketing services help you do exactly that. They help plan, establish, deploy, and drive your PPC and SEO strategy.
Most people believe that a search engine marketing company focuses only on PPC strategies. However, both SEO and PPC need to go hand in hand to drive efficient results.
Relying on PPC alone can provide short-term results at a high cost. However, sustainable long-term growth with budget-friendly costs is only possible with a combined SEO/PPC strategy.
A good search engine marketing consultant understands how content marketing drives sales. Meanwhile, they also understand how customers at different levels of the sales funnel require different approaches.
For example, bottom-of-the-funnel customers can easily be converted with a well-targeted ad. However, top and middle funnel customers need some convincing. That’s where a brand’s content marketing efforts factor in.
How Will a Search Engine Marketing Consultant Benefit You?
Opting for search engine marketing services can lead to several improvements for your website and company. There’s a good chance that your search engine marketing consultant may ask you to overhaul your website completely.
At that point, they will help you choose a web design agency too if needed. In any case, their job is to make sure every part of your website is optimized for results.
After all, your website’s outlook makes an impact on your SEO and PPC efforts.
For the most part, the primary benefit of a search engine marketing consultant is that they will help increase revenue. Here’s how various factors add up to that.
1. More Reach Leads to More Impressions
There’s a good chance that your current efforts are locking you into certain searches or categories. That hinders your ability to reach a wider audience and target a wider set of keywords.
A search engine marketing consultant’s efforts improve and extend that reach. If you’re looking to target people beyond your locality or country, this helps a lot.
Even if your focus is on a specific geographic area, you are bound to reach more people.
Greater reach leads to more impressions, whether organic or paid. That means there’s a higher chance to convert bottom-funnel customers quickly.
Meanwhile, you can make the rest of your audience aware of your product or services.
2. Increase in Traffic
A well-deployed SEO strategy can help you dominate the search results. If you manage to get in the top-three results or a featured snippet for the right keyword, it can significantly increase organic visitors.
However, getting there is no small feat, especially for common keywords. Your search engine marketing company will know what keywords you can effectively rank for. These will most likely include long-tail keywords if your website is relatively new.
On the other end, a good PPC strategy will ensure your ad shows up for the right keyword. Google displays four ads at a time and, similar to search results, the first two ads get the majority of clicks.
Getting your ad at the top is a matter of paying a heavy price, along with several other optimization efforts. That is where your search engine marketing consultant will help you.
Combined, these strategies increase your organic and paid traffic, leading to more leads and sales.
3. Improved Brand Recognition and Reputation
A website provides a basic outlook of your company. How your website looks provides further insight. However, you can have the best-looking website on the internet but it won’t matter if no one gets to see it.
On top of that, if customers can’t find your website easily, it likely means something is wrong.
However, a decent website that ranks for the right keywords provides recognition, establishes your reputation, and improves trust.
Keep in mind that this is a collective effort. If you rank on the first page but your website looks like it was made in the ’90s, it won’t matter.
These things aren’t mutually exclusive. They work together to establish your website. That helps improve your company’s recognition and trust.
4. Lower Marketing and Advertising Costs
Without optimization, the cost-per-click (CPC) of your paid search campaigns will be quite high. Your cost per acquisition of new customers will be high and your remarketing efforts will also prove to be costly.
This cost becomes exponentially higher when you target difficult keywords with higher search volumes.
Search engine marketing services help make your paid search campaigns more efficient, improving the CPC and ROI.
Their efforts also lower the cost per acquisition, allowing you to onboard new customers with a small budget. Or, you can target a wider audience or a larger group of keywords with the same budget.
Alternatively, you can reinvest your savings into other marketing efforts. For example, you can shift more focus toward SEO and content marketing efforts to build brand affinity.
5. Better Conversion Rates
Even if you have a good amount of organic traffic, it doesn’t guarantee conversions. For that, you have to devise a proper user experience based on where a customer is in the sales funnel.
On top of that, you need to target potential prospects more efficiently. That may include reworking what keywords you’re targeting, your audience, and the user journey.
Your search engine marketing company will help you establish a better user journey and experience.
That includes:
- Optimizing your landing pages.
- Improving website performance.
- Targeting more relevant keywords.
- Utilizing better conversion strategies.
This ensures that the people who come to your website through your ads are ready or at least willing to buy. There will always be outliers, but you can improve the ratio of potential buyers.
In the end, this will improve conversion rates and minimize the cost of acquisition.
What Will a Search Engine Marketing Consultant Do?
Now that you have an idea of how a search engine marketing consultant can benefit you, you might be wondering how.
A search engine marketing consultant brings multifaceted expertise. However, here’s the gist of the things they work on.
1. PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
As mentioned before, search engine marketing consultants put a lot of effort into optimizing a business’s PPC strategy.
You can’t go online and buy ad space. There will always be tons of competitors who have larger budgets and can afford a higher cost per click.
Your search engine marketing consultant helps optimize and plan your advertisements. This helps reduce the cost-per-click and improves the chances of your ad showing up.
Meanwhile, they also consistently monitor the ads to determine whether they’re reaching the right people.
It’s important to see what audience you’re reaching, how many of them are clicking on the ad, and how many are converting.
2. A/B Testing
Effective strategies are built upon excessive testing. Paid search campaigns need to be monitored at all times to determine whether they’re targeting the right people.
On top of that, you have to make sure you make your audience click on your ad. For that, you have to continuously run A/B test campaigns to see what works best with your customers.
Your search engine marketing consultant will run regular A/B testing campaigns to determine the best ad for your audience.
Every single detail counts in this case. For example, showing a price of $9.99 instead of $10 can increase your number of clicks.
To find out if that’s the case, you run two PPC campaigns that are exactly the same except for the price difference.
Compare the total number of clicks and conversions and determine what works best (and by what margin).
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO helps improve the backend of your website so it performs better. That includes proper coding, site speed, and outstanding errors that may cause a dip in rankings.
Here are a few things that improve technical SEO:
- Creating an XML sitemap.
- Making sure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Using SSL certifIcates.
- Improving site speed by optimizing plugins, pages, etc.
- Adding structured data markup.
- Removing duplicate content.
For reference, here’s Yoast.com’s XML sitemap:
In addition to these, there are several more aspects to technical SEO. This plays a vital role in determining your site’s organic and paid ranking.
4. Local SEO
Businesses that operate within a certain local area can take advantage of local SEO. Dominating search in a local area is relatively more efficient than ranking generally.
Your search engine marketing consultant can use their expertise to ensure you show up in the local pack. Studies show that 42% of searchers click on results in the local pack with local searches.
That’s because the local pack shows up above the organic and paid results.
5. Page Optimization
Search engine marketing consultants audit your site to determine how well each page is performing.
Site speed, loading times, and site navigation need to be flawless to provide a good user experience. They are important background ranking factors that need optimization.
Collectively, they ensure your website performs well. For this, you have to optimize each page on your website.
For example, proper headings, web design, good readability, and proper keyword usage are part of it.
It’s important to do this for every page on your site. You may find entire pages that need to be removed altogether. It’s also a good way to find instances of content cannibalization and duplication.
6. Monitoring and Conversion Rate Optimization
Search engine marketing consultants regularly monitor results to determine what’s working. They use Google Analytics, Search Console, Adwords, and other analytics tools to develop reports.
These reports show:
- How many users come to your site.
- How many click on your advertisements.
- How many end up converting.
Diving deeper, they show:
- What part of your audience converts.
- What’s common among them.
- How you can use that in future campaigns.
This helps in conversion rate optimization – which ensures that your website’s traffic ends up converting.
Conversion rate optimization tactics range from improving the user experience to changing CTA (call to action) copy. It’s a combined effort that includes improving the site, content, and user interface of your website.
Your site’s performance also plays a vital role in this. That’s why a good search engine marketing consultant makes a lot of effort to improve your site’s performance.
The idea is to enhance usability and improve the user experience throughout the funnel. That includes your ads, landing pages, and other parts of your website.
Final Thoughts
The digital growth of your company is heavily reliant on how well you do in the SERPs. It requires multifaceted knowledge and expertise to plan and deploy the right strategies.
Not everyone is equipped with that sort of knowledge. Hiring a content marketing agency and a PPC agency separately can get quite expensive. For smaller businesses, that’s not feasible.
However, a search engine marketing consultant provides the best of both worlds. Working with a single entity not only helps your budget but also reduces the time and effort you have to put in to onboard them.
That’s why it’s ideal for businesses to work with a search engine marketing company like EBS, providing SEO, PPC, content marketing, and various other digital services in one place.