Search Results

How to Use a Persona Let’s take as an example the following persona, “RV Betty”: Betty lives in a suburb of a city. Her husband is also retired. They have been talking about traveling in an RV upon retirement for years—this is a long-...

Background Persona You are a real estate company located in Montreal that specializes in first-time buyers. Let’s assume a quick draft of a persona. Bill and Jane are newly wed and are looking to start a family. They want to have some space because ...

In comparison to SEO, search advertising entails gaining traffic on SERPs by bidding on keywords. Search advertising is also referred to as PPC advertising because of the mode of payment: Advertisers typically pay search engines for each click their ad receive...

Banner ads are images or animations that advertise brands, products, and services on websites. They can be likened to the ads one would find in newspapers and magazines. Many types of banner ads exist, including the following: standard banners: standard siz...

Digital marketers typically advertise online through advertising networks, such as Google AdSense, and advertising exchanges, such as Google AdX (the differences between these are summarized succinctly here but are outside of the scope of this course). Althoug...

A landing page has five basic elements: First, a unique selling proposition (USP), a “unique” benefit offered by the product or the service (I put unique in quotation marks because companies usually present a benefit without it being unique). The USP is typica...

Ad campaigns can aim at building awareness, but they are typically associated with making consumers achieve specific goals, such as trying out software for free, registering for an account, sending an email to a company, or downloading a free piece of content....

A landing page is a campaign-specific page distinct from your main website that has one goal and one link (ideally, a call to action). Campaign specific: It is associated with a specific campaign. Ideally, you might also want to create specific landing page...

Reach is the first stage in the RACE framework. It entails the publication and promotion of content in order to draw visitors to our website. The two main objectives at this stage are to build awareness (about your website, brand, products, and/or services) an...

We should understand well, at this point, that we are creating webpages with the goal of ranking high on specific search queries. We also understand that not all consumers will use the exact same search query to address a specific need. Let’s go back to the se...

SEO is “the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine’s unpaid results” (Wikipedia). This differentiates SEO from the use of paid ads in order to appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Take th...

We conclude this chapter by examining how keywords can be used to analyze your competition. To frame what follows, we will assume that competitors know and follow the same rules as you should when creating webpages and choosing keywords. Your competitors ar...

Since user experience is central to ranking high, it becomes quite important to understand how people search for stuff online. We are going to talk about three ways of thinking about this. A first way of thinking about how people search is to consider the obj...

The last set of factors concern keywords. Keywords are terms you include on your webpages to communicate with search engines and with people. They help you clearly identify the ideas and topics on your webpage. Keywords are what link your webpage to the SERP t...

The second most important set of factors relates to backlinks, or links back to your website from other websites. Backlinks can be thought of as votes of confidence from other websites. It’s like a popularity contest: The more people endorse you, the more othe...

The first and most important set of factors relate to user experience, or “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service” (ISO 9241-210, 2010). Put in very simple terms: Do your visitors like t...

As shown by the video explaining how Google works, there are more than 200 variables that are taken into account when ranking websites. Some of them, though, are more important than others. Namely, we can identify three broad categories of highly important ran...

The main job of a search engine is to serve results that best address people’s search queries. Let’s say you want to know how to clean your cat. You have questions such as what kind of soap to use, how warm the temperature should be, and how you should wash th...

People use keywords to interact with content online, and most online experiences start with a search (Forbes 2017). As we will soon see, people turn to search engines for a wide variety of reasons, and these reasons provide opportunities for your firm to show ...

Social media has become central to most consumers’ lives. In some countries, social media networks have become synonymous with the internet, to the point where “many use the internet without realizing it” (Pew 2019). Social media has also fueled consumer conte...