By now I’m sure you’ve been creating your internet marketing plan for 2015. On one of my recent webinars, my colleagues and I discussed essential projects that should be included in your 2015 plan for SEO, paid, and social media programs. This blog will be highlighting projects if you are in the beginning stages of your programs. I will have follow-up blogs for more advanced search marketing projects.

 Basics: What to Include in Your Search Marketing Program

1. Define your SEO and Paid Media goals: This may seem simple, but you’d be surprised as to how many companies don’t do this. Try not to focus too much on the following: organic ranking positions of low converting head terms, decreasing paid media Cost Per Lead (CPL), and short term ROI.
2. Setup reporting and analytics: Make sure your analytics are setup properly so that you can be confident in making important business decisions. Consider testing different attribution models including first click, linear, position-based, or time decay.
3. Research your audience: It is not only important to determine who your target audience is, but what queries they search. It’s crucial, especially for SEO, to conduct thorough keyword research to pinpoint what keywords your audience searches for throughout the buying cycle.
4. Setup a successful Pay Per Click (PPC) account structure: Organize your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords into a granular structure. Prioritize your budgets, tightly align keywords with ads, and segment campaigns and ad groups as needed.
5. Setup a good foundation for SEO: Since we know the ABC’s of SEO (Architecture, Backlinks, Content, and Social Signals), make sure you set up a good foundation for each. Start with your keywords, create your sitemap.xml, robots.txt, optimize your URLs, titles, meta descriptions, content, internal links, etc.
6. Create relevant landing pages for paid media: Match content to the user queries and deliver consistent messaging. Don’t forget to test to see what content or page designs work best for your audience.
7. Setup social media and promotion: Set up appropriate social media channels and make sure you have a good schedule for distributing content.
8. Be mobile friendly: As stated by Matt Cutts, “…wouldn’t be surprised if mobile search exceeded desktop queries this year” – SMX West 2014. If you haven’t created a mobile-friendly site, we would consider this almost mandatory. Make sure to set up your site with responsive design or dynamic serving, have large buttons and clickable phone numbers, and utilize mobile-friendly PPC ad extensions.

Summary

I understand that if you are in the beginning states of your organic campaign, this list may be asking a lot. If so, tackle these search marketing projects one by one. It is more important to spend the time perfecting everything then wasting double the time later to fix it.

In the next posts, I will be talking about 2015 planning for the intermediate and advanced search marketing programs.

If you have any questions about the project ideas above, feel free to reach out to me or comment below.