Search Engine Marketing

Driving visitors to your site and leads through your sales funnel

Your website may be well-designed and well-developed, but if it doesn’t provide the right avenues for driving leads through the sales funnel, it’s not fully serving its purpose. That’s where search engine marketing (SEM) comes into play.

SEM involves digital tactics that work together to enhance a brand’s search visibility, which is made up of four pillars: content, technology, backlinks/citation, and authority. These efforts address market needs in the digital channels and social platforms your targeted buyers are engaged with throughout their buying journey. At Golden Spiral, we develop a robust SEM strategy that can address each of these pillars, and execute on this strategy in a focused, integrated manner.

The Golden Spiral team is a great extension of Connotate’s marketing team. We depend on their guidance and expertise. We have been able to optimize our online spending while increasing our leads-to-SQL ratio and know our funnel is in better shape because of their work.

Gina Cerami

VP Marketing, Connotate

Common Challenges

Do you struggle to attract visitors to your website and to convert those visitors into leads? We help improve your digital presence and garner real results and real leads from search engine marketing. Through our efforts, we address common SEM challenges:

You aren’t being found online by the right people — especially for brand terms.
You don’t use a variety of marketing touch points that support lead generation.
You don’t have a way to drive traffic directly into your sales funnel.
Your engaged audiences aren’t seeing your messages on multiple platforms.

Website Audit

With so much on your plate, it can be challenging to keep up with changing SEM trends, standards, and requirements that lead to successful performance on the web. That’s why we’re here.

Our team of search experts can conduct an audit of your current site to determine your overall search visibility. This includes reviewing your web pages’ code, content, internal links, digital citations, and technical optimizations for their SEM effectiveness. We then provide recommendations around strategic optimizations, page-centered updates, and site-wide improvements to drive higher search engine result page (SERP) rankings and enhance the user experience.

Competitive Marketing Analysis

An effective SEM plan takes into consideration the market trends impacting your industry, and your competitors’ activity. We dive deep into both to report on your competitive landscape, outlining what others are doing to take up mindshare and marketshare. This analysis covers all areas of digital marketing and provides conclusions around your top competitors’ online presence.

We evaluate the following digital marketing components:

Positioning & Messaging
Visual Identity & Website Design
Website Development
SEO
Paid Search
Public Relations
Content
Industry Events & Partnerships
Market Authority

KPI Development

Before we begin executing on any SEM strategy, we establish clear benchmarks of where your digital efforts are and where they could be. Our team works with you to develop measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business and marketing goals. Following a regular cadence, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly, we report on these KPIs to give you a clear picture of the impact made by SEM activity. These KPIs can cover website traffic, leads generated, form submissions, and more.

Search Engine Optimization

In the B2B technology space, one of the most widely used SEM tactics is search engine optimization (SEO), which is the process of optimizing a brand’s digital assets for improved search visibility and to drive traffic to the website to complete important activities. We conduct initial keyword research to determine your highest opportunity keywords that—combined with your goals and KPIs—drive our approach.

Onsite SEO

We apply SEO tactics to your website to increase your potential for being found online, which include optimizing existing content, creating new content that answers questions users actively search for, and providing the optimal user experience with search algorithms in mind. Our onsite SEO efforts cover everything from basic meta description and keyword-driven copy updates to advanced schema and code minification deployment to reducing the page load speed.

Website Services >>

Offsite SEO

Where you land in the SERP is due in large part to your industry authority, as it relates to what users are searching for, and whether the algorithm has determined that you’re the right answer to the question a user has searched. Establishing this digital authority depends not only on your website content, but on what others are saying about you. We work to secure backlinks from third-party publications and digital citations that direct users back to your site. This helps increase your site traffic overall and positions you as a subject matter expert in your industry — two factors that are critical to improving search visibility.

Paid Digital Marketing

Paid media allows for fast results and can be used to drive hyper relevant buyers to your web properties. Where SEO efforts can take a little time to have substantial impacts, paid efforts can address demand generation needs immediately — depending on the platform. We often combine our SEO tactics with paid advertising to get in front of your target audiences with valuable content that addresses their needs as a means to lock up more of the SERP for valuable terms and phrases.

This involves investing in Google and/or Bing search ads that show up in search results for target keywords. A paid advertising plan can also include Google display ads that present images or videos across the entire Google Display Network (GDN). Working with you, we determine an appropriate investment for each ad type, and implement tactics to support each campaign, including aligning headline and ad copy with keywords, selecting negative keywords you don’t want to rank for, and optimizing landing pages to create an ideal user experience. We continuously monitor search trends and updates, and refine your campaigns as needed to ensure compliance with each platform and maximize ROI.

Another key component of a successful SEM strategy is remarketing, which allows businesses to reach target audiences who have visited their website previously, as they navigate other web pages. Using organic and paid search data, as well as web analytics, we determine who should be included in the target audience and syndicate content on the social channels they’re most engaged with. This allows us to also find lookalike audience members who ‘resemble’ the audience members who are engaging and/or converting.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation supports your SEM strategy through the deployment of campaigns that offer thought leadership content, such as white papers, case studies, or webinar presentations to your target buyers. We apply SEM tactics to drive traffic to specific landing pages built for these campaigns via marketing automation workflows and demand generation tactics. With your campaigns set up, a marketing automation platform does the rest of the work for you, capturing lead contact information and promoting relevant content to engaged audiences — but don’t be fooled, this isn’t a “set it and forget it” situation. Data gathered in the platform has to be reviewed to ensure alignment with marketing goals, and refinements need to be made so your marketing automations stay fresh, relevant, and lead producing.

Content Marketing

SEM doesn’t work without content. That’s why our SEM team collaborates with our content strategists to develop and promote content that incorporates SEO best practices, with the goal of increasing traffic to your site, building up your brand’s authority, and driving conversions. Using keyword research to determine topics for blog posts and rich content pieces, we strategically plan out content to support your goals and KPIs.

Content Marketing >>

Social Media

We develop and publish content for both organic and sponsored social media posts to drive traffic to your site and increase your industry authority. This involves creating content tailored to your target personas based on demographic information we gather from social channels and web analytics.

Analytics Reporting

At Golden Spiral, we make it a priority to keep you consistently informed about where you stand on reaching your goals and KPIs. One way we do this is through regular analytics reporting. These reports provide data around website traffic, page views, time spent on pages, downloads, and more. Additionally, they cover your organic search rankings for target keywords. This data tells us which SEM strategies have been successful and which ones need to be refined, informing our approach for future campaigns.