The time, effort and funding you invest into search engine optimization can make or break your business goals. SEO can accomplish more than getting your business into the top spots in search engine rankings. An effective SEO strategy boosts your sales revenue, expands your customer base and increases your brand recognition. The value gained also grows over time. Planning your strategy around some basic SEO building blocks can put your business on the right track.
Match Your SEO Plans to Your Buyer Personas
When you know your customers’ needs and wants, your business can focus its internet marketing strategy on reaching those individuals. Your ideal buyer persona represents the target audience for your sales outreach. To make the connection with your buyer persona, your SEO keywords should reflect those items or activities that your target audience will most likely search for online.
Social media could help you better define your ideal buyer persona. Consider what lifestyle choices, occupations and purchase plans your typical buyer persona might have. Look into the major social platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and see what your potential customers share in common. The insight gained could help you to develop better keywords.
Keyword Research Helps You Connect with Your Target Audience
Try not to rely on keywords and content that reflect what you want to tell your target audience. Consider instead what your buyer personas will look for or what they hope to learn. Tracking what keywords bring visitors to your website and landing pages will enable you to leverage your investment when using pay-per-click. Review the stats and learn what words and phrases generate the most inbound traffic.
Google generally ranks organic search listings, which reflect other than pay-per-click results, based on the level of subject relevance and authority your content can provide. Although you won’t need to pay for your site showing in the organic search results, getting it to a hoped-for ranking in the search results could require a substantial amount of time and effort.
Develop a Solid Link-Building Strategy
Link-building serves as an important component in optimizing organic SEO strategies. Over the more than 20 years that Google has provided online search results, however, the dynamics driving link-building became more sophisticated. During the “earlier years,” obtaining a higher ranking in Google’s search engine results depended on the number of keyword links placed on your page. Today, as a common maxim goes, “content is king.”
Over time, it came down to a quality-over-quantity dynamic to obtain a better ranking in the organic search results. You can put this dynamic to work for you by gaining a solid understanding of what your target audience cares about. What types of answers do they hope to obtain when they begin searching online? Find out. Rather than straight-ahead selling, develop content that educates, inspires or entertains.
Create Landing Pages That Connect With and Convert Visitors
Your landing pages handle the task of converting visitors to customers after your SEO work gets them there. Landing pages represent a vital component in your online sales funnel; they should remain up to par with the rest of your SEO strategy. As noted by the Forbes Agency Council, matching your landing page text to the content that brought your visitors there plays a vital role in what occurs at “the business end” of your campaign.
Other issues to consider when designing a landing page involve its load time, call to action and the clarity of its value proposition. Don’t neglect to build in mobile responsiveness. An increasing number of click-throughs and conversions take place on mobile devices. It appears that the amount of time that visitors will wait for a page to load grows lesser every year.
Team Up With SEO Experts
As you can see, creating content and developing an effective SEO strategy can take a bit of time and effort. The investment will, however, prove worthwhile when increasing numbers of visitors come to your website and convert to customers. Rather than taking on a do-it-yourself or learn-as-you-go approach, you could better serve your needs by leaving it to the experts.
Before you commit to a DIY strategy, learn about the affordable options for getting a smart and highly effective SEO campaign set up for you. Contact the experts at Sprout Media Lab at (800) 617-6975; you’ll find them eager to help you succeed and a great team to work with.
