2017 is here! Do you know what this means for your search-marketing strategies?

The Internet landscape is continuously changing, and with the rise in mobile users and the amount of time spent on these devices, it’s crucially important that you understand what search-marketing tactics to employ, and more importantly—how to employ them.

NetElixir just created our first webinar this year: 7 Proven Search Marketing Tips for 2017 to help you navigate through this ever-changing landscape and reach your SEM goals in these coming months. Check out these seven proven tips to learn more about what you can do to grow your search-marketing strategy:

1. Create a Mobile Campaign for ‘near-me’ searches- According to Google Trends, search queries containing a location qualifier, such as ‘near me’ or ‘nearby’ have skyrocketed in recent years, with most of those queries coming from mobile phones. Our clients that employed this campaign – coupled with other mobile best practices—reported a 300% increase in their campaign orders and a 14% conversion-rate increase. So, try to isolate ‘near me’ searches into specific campaigns, and target mobile devices with a +ve bid modifier & specific day part.
2. Personalize Mobile-Ad Content with real-time location – Based off data aggregated from our seventy-plus clients, we found that personalized mobile-ad content with real-time location ultimately yielded to greater conversion rates. We suggest that you too add business data with over 16,000 city names in the United States. Then create ad-customizer format and feed the customers’ locations into the ad text to create personalized-local content so this information is received from their search queries.
3. Create a Mobile Specific PLA campaign –With the growing number of mobile users, we urged our clients to incorporate PLA’s (paid listing ad’s)–ad’s which combine text and images—into the mobile sphere. Not surprisingly, the clients who implemented this strategy reported a significant increase in their revenue. So, try to create a mobile-specific PLA campaign as well, and watch your revenue skyrocket as well!
4. Use Ad-Words Scripts to create automated location bidding – AdWords scripts can be used to automate certain procedures, such as location bidding, which enables retailers to adjust their location-bid modifiers and improve ad-visibility based on your campaign goals. Aggregated data from our client base showed that AdWords scripts with automated-location bidding helped businesses achieve their ROI (return on investment) goals. We suggest that you too customize your script to include ROI constraints and then map to your respective campaigns. Bids will then be automatically changed based on the campaign performance.
5. Conduct a Comprehensive Back-Link Analysis –Conducting a back-link analysis enables you to analyze the incoming links to your page, assess the quality of these links, identify the link-building strategy of your competitors, and improve your search-engine ranking overall. Our clients employing back-link analysis reported significant improvement in their overall SEO, so we urge you to do the same on a weekly basis to ensure trafficking to your website increases as well!
6. Refresh Content on the Website – Studies show that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet generates about three times as many leads. Many of our clients are employing this tactic, and their soaring conversion rates are standing proof of its effectiveness. We recommend refreshing your content on various landing pages on a monthly basis to establish your pages are “live”. Search engines crawl on a regular basis, and if they track a domain that has new content, they are more likely to crawl to your website more frequently.
7. Cross-Sell Customers Through Facebook Ads- Facebook has tremendous reach-out potential, so clients who have segmented email lists of customers who buy from certain categories can use this information to cross-sell these same customers on Facebook Ads. We ran a campaign using a segmented list for a client, and in a weekend, our campaign exceeded client assumptions for both AOV (Average Order Value) and CVR (conversion rates), surpassing their projected ROI by 67%. We suggest that you segment your customer emails according to the products customers buy, then add emails into your Facebook audience to target these customers with similar products and/or deals that they would find valuable.

Developing trends, namely the rise in mobile users, is making the search-marketing sphere more dynamic than ever before. Yes, it’s important to understand what tactics to employ to reach your business goals. But understand: this is a  process. It takes time to really understand what tactics – or combination thereof- will work best for you.

Educate yourself. Download our webinar 7 Proven Search Marketing Tips for 2017 and/or the free e-book . We can help you find out what steps you should take in this exciting new year.