Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy Is Your Business Strategy

Chapter 4. Building Searcher Personas

Opening the Door to the Crowd of Customers You've Been Keeping Out

By now you have learned how to use search data to improve your overall product and business strategies and seen the value of developing a search acquisition strategy. Next, we'll put these pieces together by using what you've learned about your business and potential customers to create searcher personas and search acquisition workflows that harness the power of search data for opening a whole new channel of acquisition.

Your customers are already looking for what you have to offer, but they often aren't searching specifically for your brand. If your site doesn't appear for their non-branded searches, you could very well fall off their consideration list.

If you're doing offline advertising and not ensuring your brand shows up for the subsequent search traffic that advertising triggers, you may as well be running TV commercials but keeping the store locked up with no way for customers to get in.

Remember those old Mervyn's super sale ads in which the crowds of customers stood outside the closed store chanting, "Open, open, open?" That's exactly what's happening when you don't ensure organic search is a fundamental part of your customer acquisition strategy. Your audience is standing at the door, and you're not letting them in.

Search Acquisition Strategy Process

As you probably realize by now, a successful search acquisition strategy involves more than just someone at the company with ...