This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Search engine optimization has, for a long time, been regarded as an important, possibly vital, marketing tactic for businesses, and most business owners understand that SEO is necessary to attract potential customers to their websites. However, what many website owners fail to realize is that optimizing pages without a solid SEO strategy as a foundation won’t get them the results they want. However, if you follow this four-step guide, you’ll be able to craft and execute an effective SEO strategy that will not only increase traffic to your site, but will ensure your website winds up in front of the right type of users for your marketing goals.
1. Establish Goals & Identify Target Audience
What Will Success Look Like?
The first step in determining your SEO strategy is deciding how you’ll measure success. Since this is an SEO strategy, the first thought is usually "rank highly in search results." However, defining your goal is really answering the question “Why do I want to rank highly in search results?” There are two types of goals you can base your strategy around:
- Branding: This goal is basically seeking to make you more popular by getting your brand in front of as many people as possible while creating a positive link between your brand and the user. You can measure success here by increased traffic and better user engagement by tracking impressions, click through rate (CTR), pages per session or decreasing bounce rate. Optimizing for brand awareness isn’t going to lead directly to increased sales, but it will make you memorable and increase the likelihood of return visits from customers when they are in-market and ready to buy.
- Conversion: A "conversion" is an action taken on your website, whether that be a sale, email newsletter signup or downloading an app. Measuring success for conversion goals is simple: Are the total number of conversions, or conversion rate, increasing? This is the most common campaign goal for digital marketing.
This isn’t an either-or situation. You can use a hybrid SEO strategy that uses some keywords to rank highly for high-volume, poorly-converting searches, while also targeting extremely well-converting keywords that don’t get as much volume.
Determine Your Audience
The next step is figure out who your potential customers are. The best way to do this is to construct buyer personas (also known as marketing personas). Buyer personas are generalized representations of your customers — they tell you who’s interested in and using your products. When building your buyer personas, Google Analytics is your best friend.
Start looking at broad information and then get more granular. In Analytics, select Overview under Demographics. You’ll see the breakdown of visitors by age and gender.
A quick look tells us our target audience for our business is 25 to 34 year-old men. Next, get more granular by checking in the Interests reports. This is where you’ll see what your audience is interested in, and what they’re in-market for when they visit your website.
If you want to get more granular, you can solicit customer interviews or capture personal data via forms on your website. Some information to ask for, depending on what type of business you have, includes:
- Job title, role and/or responsibilities
- City, state or country
- Industry
- Communication preferences
- Company size
- Family background and status
2. Find the Right Keywords
Your campaign goal will inform how you choose keywords to target. Since Google’s Hummingbird update, your SEO strategy should be optimized based on the way people use search engines to achieve a goal. Sometimes that means completing a transaction, but more often that means finding a piece of information or answering a question. From a marketing perspective, there are three basic ways people use search engines:
- To find a piece of information: These searchers are either not looking to buy anything, or are at the absolute beginning of the conversion process. Informational searches often include words and phrases like "how to", “do I need”, “where to find” and “what is”. Don’t count on these searchers to convert on their first visit to your site — they’re just deciding if they want or need a product in the first place. However, since informational keywords make up the majority of searches online, you should still target these users and then use retargeting to convert them later.
- To lean more about something: This sounds like the same thing as the first group, but these searchers are actually further along in the sales process. They’ve already decided they need a certain product or service and are trying to decide which is the best for them. They generally use phrases like "top 10", “comparison”, “deals on”, “cheap” or “review” in their keywords. Some of those words, particularly “deals” and “cheap” might look spammy to you, but the truth is they can help attract users who are right on the verge of buying so they can help you turn researchers into buyers.
- To complete an action: Whether it be creating an account, signing up for an email newsletter, completing a contact form or completing a purchase, these people are using the search engine to complete a task. When they click on a search result, they expect to land directly on the page that will let them complete that task, so if they have to click through to another page on your site they’re likely to bounce and not look back. These keywords don’t see a lot of volume but they should convert like crazy.
At what part of the conversion funnel is your ideal buyer persona at? Do you want to target people just finding out about your industry, to improve your brand awareness and establish thought leadership? Or, do you want to let others do the heavy lifting and optimize just for conversion rate? There’s no right answer to those questions and they’re not mutually exclusive. If you want, you can run campaigns to optimize landing pages for each type of searcher to move users through the entire conversion process on your website.
Keyword Research
Use your SEO strategy to categorize your keyword research. Group your keywords by persona and intent, so you can keep in touch with your audience throughout the conversion process. Again, the best place to start here is your analytics. Dig into your organic search traffic to find keywords that best fit each persona and campaign goal. For a branding campaign, look at impressions, CTR and average position. You can get this data in your Google Analytics account by syncing it with your Google Search Console account.
Continue reading %Create Your SEO Strategy in 4 Steps%
by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint
