I was asked recently that if I were to teach everything that I know about Search Engine Marketing to someone who is completely fresh, what I would I talk about?
I love this type of question because it forces you to think really hard, trying to figure out of so many things you could talk about, what would be the first few things that are both fundamental and vitally important.
To me, it is NOT about how to do keyword research, or learning how to use keyword planner or google trend, about best practices to write ad copy, reporting interface, click vs visit etc… The one thing that I would try to emphasise early on is the understanding or rather appreciation that behind each search query, behind each ad click is an actual human being, full of hope, fear, anxiety, personal goals and other emotions.
What we are trying to do as search engine marketing specialist, digital marketer or just marketer in general is to try to convince someone to do something, to help them explore something new, to help them move from point A to point B (A, B could be anything from buying online, to sign up for a new credit card, to read an article). As such, it is critical that we understand how they move from A to B, are they moving in straight line or they jump around a little bit, why they even care about A and B? How they make the decision.
Whatever the best practices to do keyword research, ad copy, deep linking are, they will not make any differences if you do not appreciate that it is human psychology at work.
To be very honest, I didn’t appreciate that fact when I first started with Google Adwords about 9-10 years ago. I didn’t even appreciate it after the first 2-3 years, participating in Performance Media. To me, it was all about numbers, massive amount of click stream data, about analytics, about the WHAT, about the latest bid management tools. I read from different sources multiple times that one should understand the audience insights but the truth was I didn’t appreciate it, my excuse is often lack of time.
Yet after my appreciation of that simple fact, I felt that I became a much better human being and a much better digital marketer.
So if you just start out, I wish you could appreciate it much faster than it took me (or may be you know it already then YAY!).
That’s it from me really, very short post for today 🙂
Cheers,
Chandler