Posted: May 11, 2020
SEO is Really Important, But Needs to be done right
When you’re looking to improve your digital marketing efforts, SEO is usually one of the first acronyms thrown around. Having a website that posts occasional blog content isn’t enough to rank highly in search results, a valuable source of organic traffic and leads for your business. SEO can be one of the main factors as to why a website is getting great daily traffic or sputtering to reach single digit visitor numbers. So, let’s first review how and why SEO is important.
How does SEO help your business?
Why do businesses invest in advertising and marketing? To find new customers and make sales. In the physical world, billboards, magazine ads, and signs can all get a potential customer’s attention. In the digital world, it’s a little trickier. Do you put ads on social media platforms? Do you use Google ads or pop-up ads on websites? When prospects are in the awareness phase of the buyer’s journey, they are looking for solutions, whether it’s finding the right CRM tool or figuring out how to make an at-home latte frothier.
Online searches are the first stop for many people at this stage and getting your website to rank highly for what people search for is key for potential customers to discover your business. Naturally, word-of-mouth and advertising help as well. But improving your SEO strategy so that your content ranks organically is equally, if not more, important. Because if customers can’t find your business, they can’t buy from your business.
Using SEO To Rank
When someone searches for “best latte frother” on Google, how does Google determine which sites to rank first, second, and so on?
The first links you’ll see are shopping links and ads. Below that, in the outlined box, is Google’s top suggested answer, pulled from the top ranked link. And then below that are the links that Google’s algorithm thinks best relate to your search.
According to Moz, a business that focuses exclusively on SEO and is a major blog authority on it, Google prioritizes content by a number of factors including the crawl-ability of your site (how easy it is for search engines to search your site), the content relatability (is content related to the search?), and keyword optimization (does your content attract searchers and search engines?). To make your content relatable and to optimize keywords, you need to do SEO research to determine what leads and prospects are searching for to lead them to you.
SEO Research Tips
As you are getting started using SEO best practices to optimize your website/content for better ranking potential, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with information. If you’re at the beginning of the process and are a novice when it comes to SEO optimization, you’re going to want to focus on researching first, and really getting to know the keywords, search terms, and questions that your personas are using in their searches and buyer’s journeys. Start with these three tips to begin your research:
Find online communities for your personas:
When you work at a business, your perspective is shaped by being on the “inside”, but your customers are external facing. Until you see their perspective, you won’t be able to really dive deep into keyword and SEO research. One of the best ways to start is to find online communities that would interest or relate to your personas.
To continue the latte frother example, you could use Reddit, Facebook Groups, and Instagram hashtags to find niche communities related to making coffee drinks at home. Take the time to go deep down the rabbit hole. Take notes about what topics get the most engagement. That can be a key idea of where to start looking for keywords.
Start with the most frequently asked questions:
It can be tempting to start looking for short and long tail keywords right from the get-go. However, understanding the intention behind the keywords that prospects are using will make your content more useful and your SEO strategy more effective.
A great place to start with this journey is by determining what the biggest questions are that are asked that leads people to discovering your product or service. “How to make lattes at-home" or “What do I need to make a latte at home?”” are both questions that could be asked in relation to discovering a latte frother. Use Google to discover pre-fill questions related to your product or service. Visit those online communities you found in the previous step to see what questions arise consistently.
Look to the competition:
If your competition includes established businesses with a solid online presence, they’ve likely fine-tuned their SEO strategy. There isn’t anything sneaky about looking to a competitor’s content to see what keywords they are using. They may even have an FAQ page or blog that you can peruse to get a gist of content topics and keywords that they focus on. Depending on your business, as your competitor, it’s likely that some of the keywords and topics will be a good fit for your SEO strategy as well.
These three tips will get you started on your SEO research journey. However, they are not the entire process for establishing an SEO strategy. A lot of work goes into understanding a business, its personas, competitors, and content to build a well-rounded strategy. The SEO research can help to form a basis for this strategy. Moving forward, you’ll want to determine fat and long-tail keywords to focus on, your ad and PPC strategy, and the keywords associated with the different stages of the buyer’s journey and your content.
Four Tens Digital specializes in providing a full digital marketing package for businesses that are too busy or don’t want to bring an entire marketing team in-house. We like to provide a “do-it-for-me" solution for businesses that know that they need marketing but aren’t sure where to start, whether that’s SEO or email marketing.
Interested in improving your business’s content? SEO might be the ticket and Four Tens is here to help.