How to Use Search Marketing to Outperform Your Competitors

There is an old advertising adage, from no less than Bruce Barton, one of the original founders of the Ad Agency BBDO, that “In good times people want to advertise; in bad times they have to.”

As someone who has lived through a number of bad times, it’s a mantra I very much subscribe to. There is a lot of research to back this thinking up, but, still, when times get tough, a lot of companies do, even now, believe that cutting back on their advertising and marketing spend is necessary.

At Zelst, we measure virtually everything about our work. In this post we explore what our experience of last year can tell you about the subject and, based upon the performance of Zelst Client Search Campaigns during a challenging 2022, you can discover How to Use Search Marketing to Outperform Your Competitors.

2022 wasn’t exactly a Good News year, with the War in Ukraine, the recession, the cost-of-living crisis, food shortages, people worrying about heating their homes, and the passing of Queen Elizabeth II dominating the headlines and search volumes. Then, as the year progressed, people became more and more interested in or concerned by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The year more or less kicked off with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which had a major effect on a lot of people’s lives, not to mention the supply and price of oil. Here is a Google Trends graph of interest in Ukraine and Russia:

As the impact of the increase in the price of oil was felt, inflation started to rise, then Interest Rates, and this, combined with the ongoing Covid hangover, turned attention towards an imminent Recession. Talk of the recession peaked over the summer, as can be seen by this Google Trends graph of searches around the topic of recession for last year

When we put this into the context of the last 5 years, we can see just how much concentration turned to the subject in 2022.

Similarly, the cost-of-living crisis, whilst initially ‘only’ directly affecting oil prices, gradually saw the effect of this on the prices of other goods and services, with searches surging on the subject over the summer and then again in the autumn.

The Queen’s passing in September was possibly one of the single biggest events, with a huge search of interest in September and the subject dominating the UK news scene and mood for a number of weeks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) also became a hot topic with many embracing the potential opportunities that it brings, whilst others fearing how it could develop and the potential damage that it could do.

Against this unpromising backdrop of rising costs, lower growth, reducing headcounts, cost cutting, tightening credit, job insecurity, reduced spending, the war, death of the Queen and general unhappiness, it’s safe to say 2022 was a challenging year, and not one where you would expect to see much good news.

At Zelst, we measure everything all the time, because, in the words of Management Guru Peter Drucker, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. And, as we spend our lives trying to improve the search presence of our clients, measuring is an important thing to Zelst.

In addition to reporting to our clients each month or each week, depending upon their needs, we also measure how we perform on average for our clients over the year and publish this, in a similar way to how an Investment Fund might demonstrate the returns an Investor is likely to achieve, based upon past history.

We measure our performance across all our clients. When considering these figures, it is important to remember that, when we take on a new client, they tend to come to us with one or more issues, such as their search visibility and/or traffic has been/is falling, their PPC isn’t performing, or they are not making their targets. Consequently, across the sites we measure, we have some in the decline stage, and others where we are starting to or have turned things around. We also have a number of mature clients, who lead/dominate their market and where growth is more difficult to achieve

In 2022 our worst-performing account saw a 14% decrease in organic traffic, but this was, in itself, a huge improvement from the previous year, whilst our best-performing account saw a 307% increase in traffic.

This produced an average rate of increase for Organic Search Traffic of 92.45%

Search Visibility is another metric which is very dependent upon the stage of the campaign. In the early stages of taking on an account which has seen a decline in visibility, things will often get worse before they get better, as the effects of our work does take time to show through. Once our SEO is really starting to work, however, things can improve dramatically, and visibility will grow strongly. Because we also need to be thinking ahead, once we can start to see improvements in visibility, we will then start to widen the keyword pool and target more and more competitive terms, which will tend to negatively affect the search visibility metric.

As a result of this, over the course of 2022, we saw client search visibility increases of between 2% and 82% resulting in an average rate of increase in Search Visibility of 29%

Getting found on Google has nearly always been about making sure you are appearing on page 1, if you’re not in the top 10, basically, you aren’t going to get found. As you can see from the following Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Click Through Rate (CTR) graph from Advanced Web Ranking, the 3 ranking positions get over 65% of the clicks and the CTR of position one is over six times position 4 and over 28 times position 10.

Consequently, the number of top 3 ranks is very important, and so we are very pleased that last year we managed to increase our clients’ top 3 ranks by an average of 29.08%

Rankings, like search visibility, are very much dependent on the stage of the campaign, with mature campaigns naturally having more top 3 ranks. Just like with search visibility, we tend to be constantly thinking of the future and, as much as we want all our rankings to be #1 rankings, we know this takes time and today’s Top 10 ranks are tomorrow’s Top 3’s, just as today’s Top 20 Rankings are the potential Top 10 rankings of tomorrow.

During 2022 we increased the number of Top 10 Rankings for our clients by an average of 20.53%

Traffic is all well and good but if it is not generating a return for the business then what’s the point? At Zelst, we develop strategies that will achieve our clients’ objectives, which we regularly review, based on the needs and plans of our client businesses. We carefully map Goals related to the objectives of our clients so that we can monitor the effectiveness of our activity.

These Goals could relate to orders, sales, leads, downloads or anything that is important to our client.

In 2022 we saw a 41.3% increase in the number of goals achieved for our clients.

After the pandemic/lockdown affected ecommerce growth of 2020 and 2021, ecommerce sales slowed a little in 2022, as some shoppers returned to bricks and mortar stores and the Post Office strike, in Quarter 4 and the resulting pressure on the parcel delivery network badly affected ecommerce deliveries and sales in the all-important Q4.

Despite this, in 2022 our average rate of client Ecommerce Revenue growth was 74.76%.

n a challenging year, where Biddable or Paid Media became ever more important, but the competitiveness of the market significantly increased, Zelst are proud to say we produced some really good performance figures for our clients

• Our Average Client Cost per Click (CPC) fell by 5.12%
• We achieved an amazing average 288.66% increase in Click Through Rate (CTR) for our clients
• We delivered an average 25.73% improvement in conversion rate for our clients
• And as a result of the reduced CPC and improved conversion rate, we saw an average 32.76% improvement in cost per conversion for our clients
• Our average Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for ecommerce clients was 8.68, down a little from last year, mainly as a result of

So, what have we learnt from 2022?

During the year, Zelst were fortunate that most of our client budgets were either maintained at the same level or increased from the previous year’s figure, and this appears to have been rewarded by increases in traffic, enquiries, leads, sales and revenue, in what have, otherwise, been difficult markets for our clients.

As a number of studies of Advertising in a recession have shown, those companies that continue to spend or increase advertising and marketing investment in a recession tend to outperform the market, just as Kellogg’s famously did in the 1930’s, whilst those that ‘batten down the hatches’ and cut back advertising and marketing investment tend to underperform or worse.

As the old ad adage goes, ‘ when times are good you should advertise, when times are bad you must advertise’.

Whilst our study doesn’t perhaps have the sample size of McKinsey’s or be quite as scientific, the message is just as clear that those companies who continue to invest when times are more challenging do an awful lot better than those companies who cut back on their advertising and marketing during a downturn.

And, based upon our analysed (and over-analysed) performance of Zelst Client Search Campaigns during what was a very challenging 2022, you can, hopefully, now see How to Use Search Marketing to Outperform Your Competitors.

Is your own SEO and Paid Media producing this sort of growth? If not, get in touch today with Zelst and us see how we can help your business grow.