Create a customer profile
Before you start your SEO strategy, you need to establish a customer profile. Your customer profile should cover who your target audience is, as well as what their identifiers, demographics, values, and interests are. You also need to understand more about what motivates your potential customer to make a purchase and where they find their information. If you want to learn more about how to create your customer profile, you can check out our article in our members area. Once you have a deeper understanding as to who your customer is you are in a position to start your keyword research.
Keyword research
Search engines are constantly updating and changing their algorithms, but one practice that has remained invaluable for SEO is keywords. Keyword research is the process that you identify keywords that people search for. More specifically, research involves finding the right keywords that relate to your customer and represent your products or services. There are many different types of keywords and keyword strategies. There are for example:
Short-tail keywords
Sometimes called head keywords, these are short keywords or phrases that consist of three words or less. Short-tail keywords have a very high search density and are also highly competitive. This type of keyword also has a broad search intent and therefore, a pretty low conversion rate.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords consist of three words or more and are usually much more specific than short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords have a low search volume and low competition rate. Although the search volume is low, searchers typically have a defined intent, i.e. purchasing a specific product, which means the conversation rate for these keywords is high.
Market-defining keyword
These are broad and generic keywords that represent your business or industry.
Customer-defining keywords
These keywords represent, interest or indicate your target audience.
Product and service keywords
These are keyword that represents or describe the types of products or services your business offers.
There are countless free online resources that you can use to aid with keyword research.
Create content
To incorporate your researched keywords into your site, to boost search engine rankings, you need to create quality content. To transform your keywords into content, it is useful to consider your keyword in terms of a question, subject or proposition. Your keyword should appear in your title, at least once in your first paragraph, in the meta description, headers and URL to be most effective.
Search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, which means that they can identify and penalise content with keyword stuffing. It would help if you avoided overusing your keyword as it is likely to negatively impact the quality of your content and your potential rankings, instead use keyword synonyms.
Include links
Both internal and outbound links are vital for search engine optimisation. It would help if you tried to include three to five internal links per piece of content. Internal links will both keep visitors on your site, ensure they’re engaged and make you a more trustworthy source for search engines. Outbound links will help you to be perceived as an authority and allow you to garner more trust from visitors.
Add images
Images are a great way of keeping visitors engaged with your content. When used correctly, they can benefit your search engine rankings. To ensure your images are optimised for SEO you need to add a relevant filename and alt tag. You should also check the size of the image to ensure they have quick loading speeds.
Track your progress
It is not enough to create consistent quality content, to ensure your SEO is as effective as possible you need to track your response. Tools like Google Analytics enable you to learn more about your audiences’ demographic and interactions with your site. They provide you with valuable insights on the channels by which traffic arrives at your site.
