Marketing with SEO

For the past couple of years, I’ve worked in a marketing organisation, applying what I know about Search Engine Optimisation to the field, an area which as a journalist I’ve had little to do with.

Throughout my time with the agency I joined, M&a, I’ve learned quite a bit about how to connect with clients, and how to identify and rectify their problems in a timely fashion. Scope is important, but results equally so, and knowing what you need to do is as important as getting there in the end. 

In that time, I’ve also seen where SEO fits in the world of marketing, often butting heads with SEM. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and clients and firms need both if they’re to gain an effective foothold in the world of search engines. 

SEM is the trigger to get things started. The “SE” stands for the same thing — “Search Engine” — but the “M” is all about marketing, and that means handing over to a search engine to let it place your term and search result at the top. 

Yes, it’s an ad, and it’s the often the first way to get your website noticed from all the way at the bottom, marketing your product and message to the masses without investing the time and resources needed to make a dent with SEO.

SEO, however, is the long game. It’s the strategy intended to reward provided you stick with it, optimising not just your content, but your code and server, delivering a result that can boost your website and its traffic for more than just the time you pay Google for your AdWords placement. For that reason, SEO and SEM teams should work together, collaborating to build an effective strategy that impacts both.

But did you know SEO can be used as a form of marketing? 

The king of all results

Numbered search results are going away because the numbers don’t really matter, but despite this, there is one answer that sits above all: rank zero. 

This is the search result Google believes is best, and it rewards it with a position to be envious of: above the rest. That position doesn’t just give you top of the list, as good as that is — it also gives you the response that Google reads from on its Home and Assistant services.

Get to rank zero, and you can be the answer Google reads out when people ask it a question. 

Google is everywhere

Everyone today uses Google, and some more than others. If you have an Android phone, you’ve probably asked Google a question, and if you own a Google Home speaker, you’ve done this several times. 

Google is one of a handful of smart assistants that can help you, and how we connect and converse with the search engine is helping to make it a more direct way of understanding the vast quantities of information the web has made available to us. 

It’s this technology that has allowed us to find so much so quickly, and it continues to do so with intelligence assisted queries. This comes from the idea that Google is able to find the best answer to your question by working it out from the content and code, sorting the riff from the raff and spitting out the best answer in a rank above the rest. 

SEO as a marketing strategy

In my final weeks at M&a, I was working on a rebrand for the company, now known as McCorkell.

As one of its content developers and the SEO guy at the company, I worked on something special, developing the content and working on the code in such a way where a specific setup could help shape and inform Google’s designation of what constitutes rank zero.

It needs to be said that you can’t directly impact what Google defines as rank zero, but you can shape how Google gets there. Do it right without a lot of interference, and Google will mark a result as rank zero. 

On my final day with McCorkell, that was exactly what was achieved, allowing anyone to ask “what is McCorkell” and have the answer read out. 

McCorkell’s team can now use this as a marketing strategy, encouraging others to ask Google that question, and getting the message out.

It’s all about questions

The internet is filled with questions, and Google’s search results are beginning to be shaped by what you ask. 

When an answer gets to rank zero, that question has the chance to become the marketing strategy, using Google as the mechanism to drive your marketing for you. 

As an SEO, it’s all about finding the right question which can be used to push the result you’re after. If you have any questions, like Google, I’m only happy to have a chat, to at least find out if this SEO can help get the answers you need for your question-driven strategy.