This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
It’s no secret that SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. 44% of consumers start the shopping process with an online search, and almost a third of e-commerce traffic comes from search engines. Even if you’re primarily a brick-and-mortar shop, organic search traffic is important: Half of mobile searchers visited a store within a day of their search. So no matter what type or size of business you have, search engines are a vital source of traffic.
Unfortunately, there’s one big problem: up to 96% of organic search traffic doesn’t convert the first visit to your site. A big part of this is just the natural sales process: The vast majority of searches have informational search intent. However, there’s an effective way you can find those visitors after they leave your site when they are more likely to convert: retargeting.
Site Retargeting: Recycling Your SEO Traffic
Site retargeting (sometimes called retargeting) is, simply put, targeting users who have previously visited your website with advertisements on ad networks around the web. It most commonly refers to banner ads, but you can also retarget visitors with text ads using Google’s Search Network (note: this is not the same thing as search retargeting, which we’ll talk about in a little bit). It differs from traditional display buying in that it only targets people who have visited your site, or a specific section or page of your site instead of using some other demographic segment.
How does site retargeting work? You start by placing a retargeting pixel, a little bit of Javascript, in the footer of your site that cookies your site’s visitors. Later, when your retargeting provider encounters those users out in the wild, it will know to serve them your ads, assuming, of course, that you’re bidding high enough for those ad impressions. This gives you a chance to reach out and find potential customers when they have moved further down the sales funnel, or to even gently nudge them along, even when they’re visiting other websites.
Even better, you can put a pixel on individual pages, so you can run targeted campaigns for specific products or categories.
The result? A combination of the two most effective online marketing channels. As mentioned above, SEO traffic generally converts at around 2% (2.35% to be exact). This is considered by advertisers to be the most effective marketing channel for conversions. When you combine this traffic with display retargeting, you can double that conversion rate. Some industries, such as financial services, had conversion rates increase by almost 150 percent!
Search Retargeting: Sort of SEO but Also Sort of Not
But what if you’re a brand new site, or a smaller site that doesn’t get as much traffic as you’d like? It’s hard to retarget visitors if they don’t pass through your website in the first place. Fortunately, there’s a way you can advertise to people searching for your target keywords, even if they never pass through any of your web properties, through a process called "search retargeting." Search retargeting is like organic search marketing wrapped in a display advertising shell.
Continue reading %Retargeting: SEO & PPC Working Together%
by Maria Lopez via SitePoint
