SEMrush: SEO is the Best Digital Channel to Help You Gauge Your Potential Customers’ Intent

In an exclusive conversation with PCQuest, Rohan Ayyar, Regional Marketing Manager India, SEMrush, talks about SEMrush tools and how does this tool help SME's and Startups to generate business leads. He also talks about the role of SEO in the digital marketing world. Excerpts:

SEMrush is a complete digital marketing and competitive intelligence tool suite. It has different sets of “toolkits” that cover the entire digital marketing spectrum. These are:

·         SEO toolkit (shows your metrics for the traffic a website is getting, the keywords it is ranking for and has the potential to rank for, and a complete list of sites that link back to yours)

·         Advertising toolkit (estimates the bid and difficulty for your ads to show up on Google and helps you create the best ad copy)

·         Social Media toolkit (lets you schedule posts on all the major social networks and track the reach and engagement of your posts)

·         Content Marketing toolkit (provides a complete workflow of content, from analyzing your site’s content to researching the best topics, creating articles according to templates that work best for you, and optimizing them to rank in Google searches)

·         Competitive Research toolkit (gives a complete, real-time picture of your competitors’ visibility in Google, backlinks, brand mentions, ads, and web traffic)

SEO and digital marketing tools help you identify exactly where your customer is along the buyer’s journey. Startups using a tool like SEMrush can pinpoint what their prospects’ objectives are – whether it’s just browsing, research, comparison or purchase – and then target them on a platform or digital channel of their choice. With proper content, you can then draw them to your website and nudge them towards conversion.

A Forrester report found that search influences 75% of all purchases. This is not a number you can simply overlook – this is the new reality of changing buyer behaviour. If you want your product, service or brand messaging to reach consumers, you have no option but to embrace search engine optimization and make it an integral part of your marketing strategy.

SEO and advertising do not need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, they can work better together, and insights and learnings from one channel can benefit the other. Look upon SEO as part of your ongoing marketing and branding efforts, as opposed to advertising, which can be campaign-based. SEO shouldn’t be done in spurts. When you make it a continuous process, the organic visibility on search engines eventually establishes your brand as an authority in your industry, and as a result, your brand messaging is seen as far more trustworthy than possible with advertising.

The first step is to really consider whether you’re thinking of SEO as a “strategy” and not simply a “tactic.” In marketing, that makes a huge difference. SEO is the best digital channel to help you gauge your potential customers’ intent. Depending on their product, niche, sales cycle, customer intent and competition, every company should shape and adapt their SEO strategy to maximize visibility on search engines and bring in qualified traffic. And don’t stop there – once visitors are on your site, aim for micro-conversions with the right calls-to-action that move them further down your sales funnel.