There is so much minu­ti­ae around rank­ing fac­tors that affect brand oppor­tu­ni­ty to hold the cov­et­ed “above the fold” space in a Google search that some­times it’s good to take a step back from tac­tics and make sure you’re look­ing at the big pic­ture. Here are four rea­sons you might not rank as well as your com­peti­tors in Google.

Is the organ­ic search chan­nel not per­form­ing as well as you were expect­ing? Find­ing the cause in such a com­plex chan­nel can prove dif­fi­cult. Per­haps your search vis­i­bil­i­ty is being neg­a­tive­ly impact­ed by one, or all, of the fol­low­ing strate­gic issues.

1. You Aren’t Answering the Right Questions

Topic/Category Focus

It’s no longer as rel­e­vant to focus on key­words or phras­es to dri­ve organ­ic search.

Efforts to under­stand the key­words your searchers use should now be focused on the actu­al top­ic and cat­e­go­ry that will inform their full cus­tomer jour­ney.

Focus­ing on answer­ing ques­tions rather than pop­u­lat­ing con­tent with key­words will help dri­ve larg­er gains in organ­ic search.

Semantic Search

Rel­e­vance and con­text are impor­tant to Google’s seman­tic search. As Google gets bet­ter at con­text and improves the user expe­ri­ence it isn’t enough to focus on key­words.

Mar­ket­ing efforts focused on organ­ic search need to evolve to be more inclu­sive with how a user search­es through­out their jour­ney not just in siloed key­word-focused approach but a top­ic and cat­e­go­ry approach that’s more reflec­tive of how peo­ple real­ly search.

An evo­lu­tion of a search may start with a sin­gle key­word phrase and evolve as the searchers under­stand­ing evolves “hotels in Greece”, “lux­u­ry hotels in Greece”, “lux­u­ry hotels in Greece with beach access”, “lux­u­ry hotels in Greece with spas”, “lux­u­ry hotels in Zakyn­thos, Greece” to “book Por­to Zante Vil­las”. This con­tex­tu­al think­ing is more akin to a con­ver­sa­tion and less like a key­word search.

If you want your brand to be the best direct answer to a ques­tion, then you need to under­stand the ques­tions being asked and you need to tru­ly be the best answer to that ques­tion.

Remov­ing key­word-lev­el report­ing was just one effort Google made in its’ ana­lyt­ics pro­gram to push mar­keters to focus less on a sin­gle query and more on the full user expe­ri­ence (one could also argue they also did it to bol­ster paid ad place­ment, but that’s anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion).

Knowledge Graph

Cus­tomiz­ing your knowl­edge graph is a fair­ly straight­for­ward but enor­mous­ly help­ful path for shar­ing brand infor­ma­tion.

Though the con­tent is orga­nized and aggre­gat­ed from mul­ti­ple data sources, pro­vid­ing the right struc­tured data markup ensures that your con­tact infor­ma­tion, logo, and social pro­files are dis­played cor­rect­ly. Learn more about struc­tured data here

Content Strategy

Part of a great con­tent strat­e­gy includes doc­u­ment­ing a strat­e­gy (some­thing only 35 per­cent of brands are doing), under­stand­ing your audi­ence, con­tent map­ping that audience’s ques­tions and prob­lems, and answer­ing them with the right asset in the right chan­nel at the right time.

2. You Aren’t Understanding Your Audience

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

ORM is an inte­gral part of your dig­i­tal foot­print as a brand. Whether this belongs to the brand team or the web team, it’s impor­tant that some­one owns under­stand­ing your brand ORM, good stuff and bad stuff.

Your audi­ence cares deeply if there are bad reviews about your lux­u­ry hotel in Greece, par­tic­u­lar­ly if it dom­i­nates their search expe­ri­ence. Under­stand­ing your audi­ence starts with under­stand­ing their expe­ri­ence.

Whomev­er owns ORM in your orga­ni­za­tion needs to go through the motions of being your audi­ence then hon­est­ly tack­le any neg­a­tive brand expe­ri­ence they may encounter.

Device Flow

Just as mar­keters focus on the con­ver­sion fun­nel from a chan­nel per­spec­tive, you must also under­stand device flow as a fac­tor in con­ver­sion.

This under­stand­ing helps inform brand con­tent shared, which in turn improves our abil­i­ty to cor­rect­ly answer ques­tions and have a larg­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to beat com­pe­ti­tion in the SERP (search engine results page).

Local Search

Know­ing your audi­ence means know­ing how they search.

Search queries with the words “near me” have increased 11X since 2013. If you only pay atten­tion to organ­ic search when your brand is loca­tion-depen­dent, then you could be miss­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty that your com­peti­tors are grab­bing.

3. You Aren’t Integrating SEO With Other Digital Marketing Efforts

SEO (search engine opti­miza­tion or search expe­ri­ence opti­miza­tion) isn’t a one-time event or annu­al project. It should be ongo­ing and search efforts should be woven into the fab­ric of your mar­ket­ing efforts and asset cre­ation.

Mar­keters with a top-lev­el under­stand­ing of SEO under­stand that every page should have a pur­pose (read Kristi­na Halvorson’s, Con­tent Strat­e­gy for the Web to learn more) and the titles and descrip­tions (meta tags) of those pages should be craft­ed as if they were your most impor­tant mar­ket­ing mes­sages. In many cas­es they will be seen more fre­quent­ly than any oth­er con­tent that describes a page, video, PR, image, or oth­er con­tent asset.

When SEO is siloed from day-to-day mar­ket­ing efforts, you miss oppor­tu­ni­ties to share your brand mes­sage and opti­mize assets appro­pri­ate­ly. This can often be the dif­fer­ence in your com­peti­tors win­ning, not just the top of the search fun­nel but the con­ver­sion as well.

4. You Aren’t Originating Your Content On The Property You Own

As the Inter­net con­tin­ues to evolve, one thing dig­i­tal mar­keters are learn­ing, some­times painful­ly, is how impor­tant it is to pri­mar­i­ly orig­i­nate con­tent on your site, the prop­er­ty you own.

This Hub and Spoke Mod­el from Ver­ti­cal Mea­sures does a great job of show­ing how a con­tent pil­lar or inclu­sive con­tent asset orig­i­nates on their own site, then lever­ages oth­er chan­nels and extrap­o­lat­ed con­tent (deriv­a­tive con­tent and social posts from the larg­er con­tent asset) to grow the mes­sage with their audi­ence where their audi­ence lives.

Using this mod­el does a cou­ple of things:

• It forces mar­keters to think about a cam­paign which answers their cus­tomers ques­tions that are more like­ly to be present at the right time in the cus­tomer jour­ney. For exam­ple, a finan­cial ser­vices insti­tu­tion could cre­ate a large ebook about “Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About Your 401K”. Then each part of that ebook could be bro­ken up into mul­ti­ple blog posts and dozens of social net­works shared in the right place at the right time.
• Fine-tun­ing the con­tent to a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence becomes eas­i­er when we can pick and choose the most rel­e­vant con­tent from the larg­er asset. For exam­ple, the finan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny could share rel­e­vant posts with their “Young Fam­i­ly” audi­ence about using a 401K to pay for col­lege and they could share posts with their “Prepar­ing for Retire­ment” audi­ence about the ben­e­fits of invest­ing more heav­i­ly in a 401K in your 50s.

Orig­i­nat­ing the large asset on your own site allows for that great con­tent to be ever­green and to reap the ben­e­fits of all of the shar­ing, link­ing to, and engage­ment from oth­er chan­nels. It also helps brands pro­tect them­selves from the poten­tial that social plat­forms change and even go away.

Author­i­ty for your site and all of the social plat­forms in your dig­i­tal ecosys­tem is enor­mous­ly inte­grat­ed from Google’s per­spec­tive. Grow­ing that author­i­ty will help Google deliv­er your brand as the answer to a ques­tion and also help your dig­i­tal team deliv­er on being the right answer to those ques­tions.

Do you have any ques­tions about why your site may not be rank­ing as well as you’d like in Google? Let us know in the com­ments, and we’ll do our best to help you out!