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The more potential customers can find your client’s business online, the more often they’ll choose their product or service. Greater visibility means more customers, more sales, and — you guessed it — more revenue.
This translates directly into a better bottom line for your agency.
Want to know more about search marketing visibility and get some tips on increasing your clients’? Read on for everything you need to know about how search marketing visibility is crucial to your digital marketing strategy.
What is search marketing visibility?
Search marketing visibility refers to the website traffic received from organic search results. When a company has a high ranking for a search keyword, it’ll show up higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
For example, according to Backlinko, the company in the first position of a Google search enjoys a 27.6% click-through rate (CTR) and is 10 times more likely to receive a click than the company in the 10th spot.
Good search marketing visibility puts the company in front of more people, helping drive more people to the corresponding web page on their site.
Organic visibility vs. paid visibility
These terms refer to a company being able to get found during an online search, but the criteria for placing at the top differs.
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Organic visibility is how a company ranks naturally through a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Clients may choose to boost their visibility by paying for ads at the top of the search engine results page when a person searches a specific keyword. These endeavors are called pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Agencies focus on organic visibility, paid visibility, or sometimes both to increase brand awareness and drive more people to their clients’ websites.
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How is search visibility calculated?
Marketing agencies can determine search visibility (which is a percentage) by:
Looking at the rankings for every one of the company’s keywords
Assigning a CTR based on each ranking position
Adding up all the CTRs and the total number of keywords the company is tracking
The number will be somewhere between 0% and 100%. Zero percent would signal that none of the website’s pages rank in the top 50 spots for any target keywords, while 100% would mean the web pages ranked for all of them.
Aiming for a 100% search visibility score is unrealistic.
A good score depends on various factors like a client’s size and industry. Generally speaking, companies with a score around 10% are doing fine while a score in the 30%+ range means they’re doing exceptionally well.
How to check your search visibility score
Trying to calculate a visibility score, with all the numeric formulations that go into the mix, can be daunting. Fortunately, some tools can look at your client’s online visibility and calculate it. Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Moz are three of the many keyword research tools that can run the calculations.
6 best ways to increase your search marketing visibility
Agencies that want to up their clients’ online marketing by increasing their search engine visibility can use these six actionable tips to meet their goal. While each requires thoughtful effort (and none are instant), they offer a high return on investment (ROI) over time.
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1) Understand and optimize for user intent
While there’s lots of talk about search engine algorithms and bot web crawlers in any conversation about SEO strategy, marketing agencies must always keep the target audience at the center of the plan. Successful search visibility initiatives hinge on understanding what users want and expect.
Do a Google search for one of your client’s targeted keywords and see what type of content appears at the top of the SERP. Those pieces are most likely closely related to your user intent.
Understanding the user intent helps increase online visibility by speaking your client’s audience’s language.
2) Target long-tail keywords
Single keywords can be off-the-charts competitive. If you’re aiming to rank for general keywords, you might be falling behind in your search visibility efforts.
This situation is where long-tail keywords can save your SEO efforts.
For example, instead of designating “mortgage” as a targeted keyword (and getting buried on the 10th page of the SERP), narrow it down. Use something like “first-time homebuyer mortgage in Boston.” Chances are good this long-tail keyword won’t be nearly as competitive as its single-word counterpart, which will make it easier for your agency to help your client perform better in the search rankings.
3) Develop high-quality educational blog content
Blog SEO can help build and maintain a company’s online visibility.
A company blog is a high-yield way for marketing to invest its time. HubSpot reports that 56% of consumers say they purchased from a company after reading their blog.
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Your agency can leverage client blogs to:
Inform the reader.
Place targeted keywords on their website.
Optimize images.
Employ link building (which we’ll discuss later).
Creating content your target audience finds relevant and valuable simultaneously increases SEO visibility and elevates the user experience.
4) Build more internal links
Using internal links is a strategy that helps your client’s audience easily find what they need on their website. These links direct the reader to other information on the site.
For example, say your client is a software as a service (SaaS) provider with a blog post highlighting their newest software update. In that case, you could use an internal link within that piece that sends the reader to another listicle-style blog about the top 10 must have service offerings within their industry.
Internal links are beneficial because they keep the reader on your client’s website, absorbing information about the company and product longer. In addition, links help search engines crawl and understand the entire site more effectively, which helps it rank higher.
5) Get more backlinks
When a website links text to another website, this is called a backlink. Websites may link back to a site because it has a valuable blog post or other piece of information. Search engines view these as votes of confidence about the website and rank it accordingly.
The more backlinks a website has, the more positive search engines will rank it.
The higher the domain authority of the site doing the backlinking, the better.
Tips for earning more backlinks
Pursuing backlinks is challenging because you don’t want to come across as a nuisance by asking high-authority sites to link to your client. However, the payoff is worth it.
Here are some of the best ways to execute a valuable backlink strategy:
Create content others find valuable: Write relevant, accurate, and easy-to-understand content, and other complementary sites will link to yours.
Offer to guest post: Find a handful of websites with similar target audiences as your client’s and offer to guest post at no charge. If they like the content on your client’s site, they’ll probably agree and allow you to link to your website within your content piece.
Research “link roundups” that relate to your topic: Some content creators write long-form pieces just to link to other pieces of content. These pieces are typically emailed out to subscribers and shared on social media consistently (daily, weekly, monthly, etc). Find link roundups that cover your topic and ask if a piece of your client’s content can be included.
Find (and capitalize on) broken links: As the internet grows older, there are links floating around that go nowhere. Target a few high-quality, relevant websites and see if any of their anchor links are broken. If so, reach out and tell them you have the perfect, fresh link to replace it with.
6) Expand your social media presence
Posting on social media channels gives companies a cost-effective way to build relationships with current customers and reach out to new ones. Sharing a snippet of a timely blog post, a call-to-action (CTA) to an e-book or case study, or a contest engages the audience and drives them to your landing pages.
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A successful social media campaign requires certain components. Here are the ones that are proven to increase a company’s online search visibility.
Tips for improving your social media presence
Produce quality, relevant content: Spammy, inaccurate, off-the-mark, or generally uninteresting content won’t get your client seen on social media. Take the time to think about what your client’s target audience wants to know about and craft compelling content around those topics.
Post consistently: A haphazard, whenever-we-have-extra-time posting is like dieting once a month; it’s not going to help. Work with your client to establish a content calendar and commit to posting regularly to maximize your social media reach.
Leverage photos and videos: A big, long paragraph won’t grab readers’ attention like an interesting or funny photo or video. Mix in different types of content to engage readers and improve your client’s social presence.
Review your results: Closely analyze your client’s new followers, likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs on every social media post. Over time, these metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) will show you which types of content speak to and motivate your audience.
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Pro tip: Organize your SEO workflows with project management software
Maintaining an SEO strategy is a vital part of your digital marketing success. Increasing a client’s online visibility and ranking higher on search engines is an ongoing process: Success typically demands ongoing attention to and changes for the campaigns.
Project management software like Teamwork helps agencies manage their search marketing visibility initiatives as well as it does for other projects.
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A few features of Teamwork that benefit search marketing online visibility workflows are:
Planning workloads: It’s easy to see who’s responsible for what and make adjustments if needed with Teamwork’s workload planner. Clear ownership keeps things from falling through the cracks — which keeps your clients happy.
Resource scheduling: Keep projects from going out of scope by scheduling resources ahead of time. This ensures that your team has exactly who (and what) it needs for each project, and gives you a better understanding of your agency’s overall business capacity.
Project profitability: Easily digestible profitability reports help agency owners and managers see which projects are the most profitable — and which team members contribute to the bottom line.
Streamline your SEO projects with Teamwork
Building an online visibility strategy can increase your clients’ rankings on SERPs and help more searchers find their way to their websites. The return on investment (ROI) of such a project is high, and you’ll see more conversions and higher revenues. Practice diligence when creating high-quality content, be consistent when using your (preferably long-tailed) targeted keywords, and pay attention to the results.
Companies grappling with their SEO strategy and looking for a way to increase their search rankings should look to Teamwork. With our robust task management, cohesive communication tools, and intuitive reports, you can stay on top of your efforts and see measurable results faster than ever. Contact us today for a demo.
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