Imagine if you will…
You have had some shortness of breath lately. It hasn’t been critical but you also have had a nagging cough that just won’t leave. You don’t feel like your normal self and arrange a checkup at the doctor. At the check up, you are told that you have a chronic condition named C.O.P.D. You are surprised and a little in shock. You didn’t expect this. The doctor doesn’t have much time to talk to you about it but says that you have to get more exercise, eat better, quit smoking, and start using oxygen. You get home and want to know more about this new reality.
- Where do you turn? the internet, social media, friends and family?
- What questions do you have?
- Where can you find answers?
This is where search engine marketing in the health world usual starts.
It starts with a problem – a need – a pain point (not a purchase decision yet, just gathering information). When customers have questions, they usually pick up their smartphone (its often the first thing we pick up in the morning and the last thing we put down at night) and search Google for answers.
Google is pulling information from all available sources. Corporate website pages – product pages – lifestyle articles – Facebook posts – Tweets – Pinterest pins – LinkedIn bios and articles – Blogs – etc. Google treats all this web content as potential answers to questions. All of it is being evaluated and presented if it is relevant to the user’s search or “keywords”.
Google provides any relevant answers to the user in a Search Engine Results Page or SERP. Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business website appear in those search engine results pages using paid advertisements.
This process hinges on our ability to be found by the customer.
The first law of e-commerce design states, “if the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product.” So, the biggest goal in customer searches is to engineer our messages (ads), promotions and content to be find-able when the customer asks the important questions. Once a customer sees an potential answer that they like, they click on that link and hopefully the experience is compelling enough for them to take action on the website or landing page. If they clicked on our ad, we have to pay Google. If they don’t click, we don’t pay anything.
The competition is fierce for the small real estate of the mobile screen.
Think about your own search habits. How often do you go past the first page when looking at results? Being listed at the top of the SERP, especially in mobile, is critical. People may scroll up and down but the harsh reality is that over 92% of clicks are happening in the area above the 4th organic (unpaid) listing. This may be changing a bit as users get more accustomed to scrolling down. But current data trends state only 8.5% of web traffic makes it past the first page. So our paid ads need to be relevant to what the user is searching for.
The keys to success lie in understanding what our customers need, how they ask questions, and how to word our answers. We want the person on the other end to know that we understand them and want to provide some relief in every experience they have with the Accu-Chek brand. Identify the path of customer questions, the keywords or string that they use along that path, and what we should be giving customers at each step along that path (as they keep adding variables to their search).