Learn how to show up when customers search for solutions using SEO and Google Ads. Start with keyword research to find what people actually look for, then decide whether to rank organically or bid on ads. Send traffic to landing pages that match what they searched for, not your homepage.
So one of the things in demand generation is to capture existing demand. Now, in this scenario, I'm assuming that the market that you're in is mature enough that people are searching for it. There are some markets where people aren't searching for you yet because they maybe don't know that that category exists, right? Or they may not be thinking, oh, there's a solution to the problem that I have. And so they're not maybe searching for it, but for most industries, there's some sort of existing demand that's already out there, right? And so what we wanna do is we wanna make sure that we are, we are there when they are searching for us, right? So we're gonna talk about a few places, right? So when people are searching for you, Google is obviously kind of the first thing a lot of people think about, right? So here's an example, right? Hey, I'm looking for home security in Lehigh. Typically on a search result, you're seeing kind of 3 kind of categories, 4. If you're, if you're a product company, you might see products listed across the top. If you're a service-based company, usually you'll kind of see these 3 categories, right? You'll see a paid ad, usually has a sponsor tag on it. You'll see kind of this local SEO, like a map, and then you'll see an organic listing. And again, if you're a product company, you'll probably see products across the top as well. But the question is, when somebody searches for the thing that you offer, are you there, right? Um, there's kind of two strategies here: organic search versus paid search. The organic side, right, it's free. I'm going to put it in quotes because it's not really free. The cost is time and energy and backlinks and brand and all those other kinds of things, right? But in organic search, right, there you, you rank. There's an algorithm called PageRank. It's typically determined by— and we'll talk maybe a little bit, I'll come back to this— but basically you're going to be ranked against your competitors. Um, you know, the idea, the whole goal is, can I get on page 1? And If I'm not on page 1, usually you don't get found, right? Maybe top of page 2, but that's kind of the strategy. Can I rank on keywords organically? If you can't rank, then the next place to go is paid, right? So can I pay my way to the top and have results? One thing I've seen sometimes is that we often— I often see companies bidding on their own brand. Right? And so you have, you know, your brand and you're actually ranking number 1 on the brand, but above your brand you have your ad. And so you're kind of in some cases just spending money to spend money because there's no other competitors maybe searching for your brand specifically. Right? And so if somebody types in your brand and you don't have any competitors that are paying against you, you really don't need to do paid search if you're ranked number 1. Now, if you're ranked number 2 on your brand or 3, or maybe you have competitors bidding against your brand, then having a branded paid strategy makes sense, right? But really what we're looking at is kind of these 2 and how can you rank on those. So one of the things you want to do when you're looking at search engine marketing is keyword research, right? So this is typically where both an SEO and a paid strategy starts. So what we're gonna look at is we're gonna look at, hey, what are all the keywords that people are searching for and can I rank on those? You know, what's the competition look like? Do I wanna bid on them? And what's that strategy? And we're gonna actually go into Google Ads here in a minute as well and just talk a little bit more about keyword research. Once you have the keywords, then you wanna launch your paid search ad, right? So the ad typically includes, you've got your URL, you usually have an H1 kind of headline, and then you've got descriptions. Google Ads will let you write a whole bunch of these headlines and descriptions and they'll actually rotate for you to try to find the optimal combination of those. You can also have extensions, right? So you can add a phone number, you can add links, you can add little guarantees or quotes or offerings. All of these enhance your ad. You can actually add an image, you can get verified, right? So there's things around the ad that also, one, it takes up real estate that your competitors don't have, right? So if you have a lot of extensions and things like that, your ad becomes more prominent. So obviously launching those search ads is gonna be a key part of that. Those search ads usually land on some sort of landing page. A common mistake that I see happening is that the landing page is just their homepage, right? So Google is going to give you authority and rank depending on the quality of the site that it's going to and the relevancy of the keyword that's being searched. The question is, does the site and does the ad answer the question that the person is searching for, right? If everything just goes to the homepage, it probably doesn't answer the specific questions. So in paid advertising especially, we often want to build landing pages, and we want those landing pages to be related to the keywords that they're searching for so that when somebody searches it, one, the ad says, hey, you're looking for home security, great, here's a homepage about home security, right?
