Growth Channels -- Continue | Week 7 | Review

SEM, Content Marketing and Future look 

This is blog post #7 as part of the series of blog posts in which I will sum up my learning experience with CXL Institute attending their Growth Marketing Minidegree.

Last week I talked about the User Mental Model.
Today I will continue with Growth Channels that can Amplify your business Growth summing up my learning experience and review the following key takeaways:

> When it comes to SEO, what metrics should we focus on?

SEO main objective is to capture potential customers by the keywords involved In the questions they ask. they could be in the TOF/MOF/BOF stage, that's important to consider o and find what keywords would fall under the top of the funnel, middle and bottom-funnel and capture them in their search. When doing SEO you should always focus on the goal that's directly linked to a business goal, for example increasing website traffic for an E-commerce store, it's considered to be an SEO goal that's linked to a business goal, in the end, refects in revenue but In general for blog posts, then tracking backlinks to understand where the traffic coming from, another goal would be bounce rate which is extremely important as it affects you rank on Google, websites with high bounce rate are bad UX websites for google which in the end lower your Google rank. 

> Keyword Research and Developing Content

So for the keyword research, you can start with your products/services, assess the competition, determine high search volume keywords and prioritize content accordingly. 

for Prioritization, you want to go after the higher keyword volume with low to medium difficulty levels. You can use tools like Keyword Planner by Google, Ahref, Moz and brightedge. Also, your keywords need to be relevant, high volume keywords won't matter if it doesn't make sense to the user or the potential customers.

As for the content, start content gap analysis to find opportunities for you to develop content accordingly, you can do the gap analysis by assessing your current approach, comparing competitors strategies and building your roadmap to achieve your goals.

The next step is to start executing creating the content, creating the blog posts, taking a look at those keywords it's a blog post, social media post, those are the areas where you want to start building out content to fill in the gap. Create the content that you think is going to resonate with your users because that's what's going to allow them to share your content and cause that virality for you and drive that growth for you.

> Off-Page SEO (Linkbuilding / Backlinks)

Acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own that's what's backlinks or link building is all about but how search engines use backlinks, search engines use backlinks in two main ways, first to discover new pages and second to determine how a page ranks in SERPs and that's why the search engine is very important. 

When Building backlines you should focus on the following: 

• Seek links from quality high ranked sites. Quality beats quantity here. 
• .edu  and .gov will give you high authority
• Relevancy to the industry 

> On-Page SEO

Content and how HTML code is optimized that's what On-page SEO is all about, so when optimizing on-page SEO focus on the following: 

• Page title; Important to include Targeted Keyword and/or brand name in page title
  
  
• Meta description; though there isn't much SEO value for ranking, what the meta description does if the user is the description for them to improve your click-through rate, which then improves your SEO rating.
  
  
• URL; another structure for on-Page SEO, this includes how you put your keywords in the URL string and to make sure that you have that targeted keyword in that URL string.
  
  
• Header tags (h1, h2, etc.); Optimize your header tags. There can only be one H1 tag on a page. Other H2s and H3s, you can have multiple and that would be okay.
  
  
• Image alt-text; ensure that you also place your keywords inside the alt-text for a search engine. For the on-page SEO
  
  

> PPC / SEM 

Some would say that PPC is expensive and that's right only if you are doing it wrong, and by doing it wrong I mean not finding the right channel and your pages aren't converting well compared to your competitors. Why PPC is the best placement on SERPs?! simply because it gives you the chance to speak directly to your target audience. The evergreen goal of PPC is to have a High CTR with low CPC/CPL and a high conversion rate, and what helps in reaching that goal is to optimize your keywords and ad messaging language to the keywords and language on your landing page, simply put is to be relevant. 

There are two main types of PPC Campaigns, awareness and lead generation, as for awareness you can go for it if you're a new business and need to attract the attention of your target audience to who you are and what you offer, to show them that you exist. the next step of the funnel would be to start showing them why you? and lead them to fill out the checkout form if you are an E-Commerce platform or sign up form if you're SaaS. 

There are different PPC channels, like Google for starter which has a 60% market share of search engines, Bing who it might seem like a less competitive search engine compared to Google but maybe that is where its USP come from, the less popular the more potential opportunities you may find there. also, you have displayed ads, Facebook and remarketing.

> Content Marketing

Content marketing is the core thing that ties all of the social, SEO, PPC, PR. Content marketing is the centre of it all. Without the content, you wouldn't be able to share. 
In this buzzy world, customers have all means of accessing information so you need to be there active and up for them when they are trying to find a piece of information in your industry domain or related to your product and services. Data shows that 70% of consumers actually would rather get to know a brand through articles rather than ads. Studies have shown that companies that blog actually get 5X more traffic than their competitors. Which then becomes, better conversion rate and obviously more sales.

The key thing to realize is that content marketing isn't just about writing blogs. It's about all the content that your company and your brand is putting out there on the Internet. Whether it's video content, it's a photo, it's a blog post, it's a page or a PR piece, or a press release. being able to find the right channel for that content is crucial for growth marketing.

> Emerging Channels 

Why think of emerging channels? the benefit of being at a start-up or early-stage or smaller company is being able to look at what the giants are doing and play around.

You have the speed to be able to take a look around, identify new channels and experiment, test. You're going to move a lot faster than the larger competitors or you're competitors that are already out there, who feel like they've already identified their channels, who are already target focused on the channels that are working for them.

Some of the emerging channels that are up and coming, are AR and VR Technologies.

I will be continuing with Research & Testing in next's week blog post.