SEO can be tricky.
There is hundreds of information available on how to do SEO and knowing what to implement and which information to discard can be quite tough for most businesses.
That is why I am writing this piece. To share with you an SEO framework that you can build your strategy around if you want to rely on organic traffic to grow your business.
SEO takes time so you do not want to waste your time and effort pursuing a strategy that can fail or not yield a good result.
Let’s dive in.
#1: Audience is King
You must have heard different saying that content is king but without the audience, then your content is useless.
This is why it is important to focus on the audience when taking your business online. You need to know exactly who you are building your website for and how your service can help them become better at what they do.
This means you want to know:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Goal
- Pain-point
Simply put you want to identify who you are building your site for.
Audience personas are fictitious sample of who your target audience is. You can get this information by talking with some of your existing customers or you can use data to come up with the information required.
When you build out your audience, it makes it easier to know if your business is attracting the right set of people to you or not.
You do not want to build a website full of small text when probably your audience are of the older generation and may need their glasses to even read the prints on the screen in the first place.
Build your website for the audience first and foremost.
#2: Content is Queen
Focus on the content. Content is an integral part of today’s online success. This is simply because traditional means of advertisement are gradually losing their value and the new generation is well equipped to research and make their own buying decision even before they come into contact with a sales person.
But the greatest mistake you can make with your content is treating content as something that stays on your blog or as another avenue to promote your services.
Yes, indirectly content marketing helps promote your service but you must build a good brand for yourself first. Only when your content resonates with your audience, will they trust you enough to bring out their wallet and pay for your services or whatever product you are selling.
This is why it is important to treat all the content on your website as the holy grail. From your home page to information on the contact us page, each piece of content on your site must be well written and contributing to the overall success of your website.
And that is why the guiding principle for any content on your website is an effective keyword research process.
Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases people are using online as they search for information that relates to your business.
Some of these searches can be informational, navigational or transactional.
Understand how the various keywords people are searching for affects your website content and then use them according.
#3: Technical SEO rocks
If you think the audience is king, content is queen and then wait until a Google spider hits your website and finds it difficult to parse information on your website.
As intelligent as Google is, it is still an artificial intelligence machine that needs to be fed with data to correctly interpret the information it finds on the website. This is where fixing the knowledge of on-page optimization is important.
At minimum, you want to make sure that
- You have your sitemap and robot files properly configured
- Your Title tag, Meta description, image filename, alt tag, url structure and contents contain your keyword appropriately without over optimizing.
- Content on the each page of your website is written for humans and not search engines.
#4: Backlinks are rooks
Build links.
Yes, you heard me right. For you to get the desired position, one of the things you need to do is build relevant backlinks that can improve your traffic and ranking.
There are lots of different link building techniques that you can use but I will share with you today, some easy 5 link building technique every business can use to get links.
- Infographics – Infographic is simply data that are presented in graphical forms. No matter what industry you are, there are alway data or information that you can present in a graphical form.
Getting started with making infographics are easy. Here is my three-step strategy for generating backlinks with my infographics
- Create my own survey – There are different ways to create surveys. You can use WordPress plugin or Google doc or to build your own survey. What is important here is to find an interesting angle to your story. While thinking of your survey, look at the set of people who will be interested in it.
- Build the infographic – Once you gather your results, get a graphic designer to turn it into an infographic or simply any of the infographic building tools.
- Promote it – Now here is where the fun is. Write a blog post about the infographic and promote it to your target audience.
- Make friends with bloggers in your industry – Every industry and niche have its own list of influencer. These influencers are usually people who have their own blogs and can write about you or your industry. Get a list of 20 of them in your locality. Organize a physical meet up where you ask them to come for a breakfast meeting to discuss the industry or their passion.
- Directories – You might have heard that directories are not your very good technique for backlinks but like every link building technique, it is not what is done but how it is done that makes the difference.
Look for local directories in your industry and get on them. If you limit yourself to relevant directories, you will find out that you don’t have an option of submitting to 1000 directories which were the past mistakes people made when building links with directories.
- Competitor analysis – One of my favorite link building strategy. Analyzing the competitors. If you are a new entrance to a niche, there are already people who are ranking for the most important keywords in that niche.
How nice would it be to reverse engineer their success? All you need do:
- Take the keywords you want to rank for
- Plug it into Google ( of course, conduct your search-incognito)
- Analyze the backlinks using your favorite backlinks analysis tool
- Get all those that you can. Stay away from directories, paid links or those you simply can really figure out why it was given.
- Now find more of those types of links and go get more.
Do not limit yourself to getting only the links your competitors have. You may end up playing second fiddle. Rather, go a step forward.
- Write for other blogs- We call it guest posting. Guest posting, when done right can bring in the traffic and links you require and best of all; it is very easy to do. The challenge with guest posting for new business is that no one really will care about you in the beginning so you have to prove yourself.
Write great articles on your blog foremost and then contact other sites that are seeking audience like you. Do not shoot for the big shots first like leading industry magazines except you have something so spectacular that they can’t turn you down like the survey we discussed earlier in this post.
Rather, take the stairs slowly and gradually build your authority from zero. The result as always is usually worth the effort. So how do you begin to guest post? Fairly easy.
- Do a Google search for sites in your industry that allows guest posting. A simple query like “Keyword” write for us
Will throw up some blogs you may be able to write for. Ignore results on the first page of Google.
- Take a look at the site. You want a site that is recently updated, contact information easy to find and looks like it is managed by people
- Make them your friend. Comment on their blog post. Share their articles and generally be useful to the community.
- Now make your own pitch.
If you do the above very well, you might even find yourself been called upon to write for the site rather than the other way round.
Conclusion:
SEO is part art and part science. Making it work for your business should not be too difficult. It takes only an understanding of the fundamental framework or what I call the bare necessities and then building on them.
Be ready to work hard and understand that while the process might look slow, the results are usually long lasting when done just right.
Adegboye Adeniyi
Latest posts by Adegboye Adeniyi (see all)
- How Small Businesses Can Get Started With Content Marketing - October 7, 2016
- How To Configure Google Analytics For Online Business Success - July 25, 2016
- How to build A Successful SEO Strategy - June 30, 2016