Search marketing is a sales conversation online: your pages and ads answer the buyer at the moment of the search. A marketing team that has search skills can show the direct link between each task, its cost and its result.
Why marketers need search skills
Search engines are the largest marketing platforms online. Each engine uses its own formula (algorithm). A marketer does not need to write code. But the marketer needs to know the logic of the algorithm in plain words: intent, context, content and technology.
Product and brand managers already know the 4Ps of marketing. Search skills let them use relevance, context and intent in digital prospecting. This decreases the money spent on marketing materials that do not sell.
Search marketing is measurable. You can report return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per acquisition (CPA) to your finance and business managers. Data replaces opinion.
Signs of a skills gap
- Your team cannot say what buyers research about your product.
- Competitors get the first results for the words your buyers use.
- Your team has SEO tools, but uses only a small part of them.
- Nobody can show the cost per lead for each channel.
Three questions for each team
- What do people research about our product or service?
- How do we get more attention than our competitors at the moment of intent?
- How do we measure and improve our results on the search results pages?
Who needs these skills
These teams work together on growth, so they need the same words and tools:
- Product management, and advertising and promotion teams
- Sales and marketing teams
- Corporate communications teams
- Copywriters, content creators and webmasters
- Analysts who work with marketing data
People who have no experience in sales, marketing or advertising should first learn the basics of business goals and the marketing plan.
The skills to build, in order
- The framework: know search engine marketing (SEM), SEO and the sales funnel, plus their terms and ranking factors.
- Strategy: use research tools to find the keywords and the brand drivers for your product.
- Quality score: know how ad platforms score relevance, and how this changes your cost per click.
- The SEO page: write a page that ranks and moves the reader to the next step in the funnel.
- The landing page: make a page for search ads that converts clicks into enquiries.
- Control: set goals, monitor the cost and manage the people who do the work.
The tools a team uses
- Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
- Google Business Profile and YouTube
- Keyword and content research tools, for example the Google Ads Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and Semrush
- WordPress, with basic HTML and CSS
- Audit tools, for example Google Search Console, Screaming Frog and GTmetrix
These tools have many dashboards and use automation. A team that has no training uses them badly, as with spreadsheets for a person who never learned Excel.
What to do this week
- Ask your team the three questions above. Write down the answers that they cannot give.
- List the search tools that you pay for, and who uses each one.
- Agree one metric for search, for example cost per qualified lead, and report it each month.
For the wider digital plan, see the Digital Marketing course.
