Research & Strategy

The development of any solid marketing plan requires research. This same logic holds true in search engine marketing. Simply focusing on earning high listings for a few key terms does not create the foundation for an effective search engine marketing campaign. At Captiva we typically perform a 10-step Comprehensive Site Analysis on existing sites to create a sound search engine marketing strategy that will deliver the best return on your investment.

Our Comprehensive Site Analysis includes the following:

  1. Define Goals & Objectives - Review your company's position in the market, its competitive advantages, primary products, goals for the SEM program, existing site optimization, and other advertising/promotion programs that may complement our SEM activities.
  2. Keyword Identification - Research, brainstorm, and utilize keyword databases to determine how people are actually looking for your products and services.
  3. Competitive Keyword Analysis (Organic) - Manually review existing listings for primary keyword phrases to determine which forms of search engine marketing will provide the best ROI.
  4. Competitive Keyword Analysis (CPC) - Review bids for desired keyword phrases in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing to identify opportunities and develop a proposed budget.
  5. Link Structure Analysis - Review source code and programming language to identify any issues that may be impeding the search engines from indexing your site's content.
  6. Site Architecture Analysis - Analyze the architecture of the site to identify opportunities where changes can be made to improve the link popularity of internal pages within your site and simplify user navigation.
  7. Site Content & Message Review - Review the content of the site, the marketing message, and the call to action to ensure that pages are not only algorithm compliant, but will invoke the desired response.
  8. Link Popularity Analysis - Analyze the link popularity of the site versus the company's direct competitors and those sites currently ranking well for its desired search phrases.
  9. Site Traffic Review - Assuming your site has an analytics program in place, we can review this data to see where its existing traffic is coming from in terms of referrers, keywords, and search engines.
  10. Strategy & Budgeting - Develop a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy that may include on-page optimization, link building, pay per click advertising, submission, and other online promotional programs along with estimated costs for implementation and ongoing management.