Getting personal with SEO: how to use search behavior to transform your campaign

In order to meet the needs of today’s consumers and a more intelligent digital market, creating value in optimization campaigns requires innovative thinking and a personalized approach. Adverts, landing pages, and on-site messages that feel tailor-made are becoming the norm for many brands, contributing to higher response rates, visibility, and value.

Arguably, in today’s post-truth era, creating a personal message that can tap into the emotions and needs of a consumer is exactly the direction in which we will continue to progress. It’s also likely that in the near future, this will become the only way that optimization campaigns can be successful.

Anyone can enhance and deliver stronger campaigns by picking insights from search behaviors and using them to directly address your digital customers. But how can you maximize the effectiveness of doing this? Using Delete’s European Search Award-winning campaign for Leeds Beckett University as a case study, this article will take an in-depth look into profiling and understanding your browsers to attract and convert new customers.

Why utilizing user search behavior is necessary in campaigns

From Google’s personalized search algorithm that was launched in 2005, to 2015’s RankBrain, search results have consistently shifted towards searcher satisfaction rather than the needs of a webmaster or business. As users began to demand more intelligent, considered content (keyword stuffing is now a definitive no-go), we’ve had to adapt by creating engaging content that is authoritative in terms of knowledge and information.

There are clear signs that behavior signals are on Google’s radar. Google now elevates the results that it considers to be more relevant to a searcher based on profile information that it gathers about them. So, when it comes to creating your own outreach campaigns, it is only logical to harness and use this profile information to influence post-click user experience.

Harness search behavior to create customer profiles and develop positive relationships

Using search behavior information and user profiles is important because of the phenomenal results you can achieve, particularly at a time when advertising is becoming more challenging by the day.

Splitting users into customer profiles is a method that will enable the creation of targeted, tailor-made advertising and content that is more likely to result in conversions. There are a variety of ways that user behavior can be tracked and profiled, varying from more in-depth and specific methods to quicker, cheaper options that may benefit a brand looking to boost a current campaign or alter the way that their advertising is completed in-house. Not only will customer profiles ensure that only relevant content is delivered to users, but it can also contribute to the development of customer trust and loyalty.

Delete’s Leeds Beckett campaign saw the development of delivering tailor-made landing pages and adverts to international students in an aim to encourage verbal contact with the university as early in the cycle as possible and to make an easier, less daunting application process. By using geographical data, we were able to create customer profiles for international students, which then meant we were able to serve carefully selected imagery to visitors from China, India, and Europe, as well as clear and relevant calls to action.

Splitting apart potential customers by geography, interests, and type of content consumption on the site is the most efficient way to create customer profiles. It can be done through both organic searches and paid searches, with both outlets leading to different customer bases across a variety of platforms. Leveraging existing data is also a practical and simple solution that will help develop stronger relationships with a current customer base. You can then lead users to dynamic pages and imagery that are reflective of organic searches, geolocation, and paid advertising clicks.

The value in creating customer profiles from paid or organic searches

Advertisers now have to look for ways to outsmart the competition. Unfortunately, managing a campaign well is no longer anything special, but a default expectation. Try going beyond the boundaries of just “best practice” SEO or PPC and show real innovation and creativity; it will really pay off.

Using data from users’ organic searches enables a valuable customer profile of people who are already invested or interested in a brand. When it comes to applying this behavior to SEO, it results in the opportunity to tap into a receptive audience who will benefit from additional information and who may have abandoned conversion if they hadn’t been given access to the information that they were looking for.

Delete’s campaign with Leeds Beckett University experienced phenomenal results. For a typical budget for a campaign of its caliber, we were able to generate approximately £6.9 million revenue in one year and an ROI of 10,403.00%. The use of customer profiles undoubtedly played a large part in this.

Use geographical data to deliver direct and relevant information

In an aim to target potential customers and increase conversion, Delete used an innovative method of developing a live map that would plot the addresses of past enrollments, prospects gathered at educational fairs, and open day registrations. This completely changed their geographical targeting in all marketing campaigns, resulting in a 691.67% increase in traffic to the clearing section.

By creating customer profiles based on geography, there is the opportunity to attract and cater to people who may have less initial interest as well as reduce abandoned conversions due to unrelated content. As well as this, it can encourage behaviors that are natural and reflective of the user with a lower cost per click and a higher volume of leads.

Revolutionize the way you use paid and organic search behavior for remarkable results

To maximize results in a marketing campaign, create dynamic landing pages and website experience based on recorded search behaviors and the profiles that can be subsequently created using this information. When it comes to paid ads, you can pass targeting and settings to a website and use this information to personalize the website.

With organic listings, you can glean user interests from entrance pages from organic search and what users do once they are on a page. If you create your landing pages right, so that they target the desired keywords well, you can also make assumptions from people landing on these pages from organic search and then interact with them in whichever way you want, even targeting certain interests.

For example, in our campaign with Leeds Beckett, if a user indicated an interest in a Civil Engineering degree (by clicking on a PPC ad from Civil Engineering for Undergraduates ad group), the landing page or the whole website would start surfacing an image of a work placement student standing on a building site, wearing a hard hat and high visibility jacket. This brings the individual student’s interests to the surface, highlighting the best relevant features that the university has on offer. Ultimately the aim here is to shorten the user journey and increase the chance of a conversion.

This can be applied to almost any marketing area or industry, and it will transform the way that your users are able to engage with your content.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/08/29/getting-personal-seo-search-behavior-transform-campaign/