Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a big part of inbound marketing and it plays a key role in attracting your buyer personas to your website. 81% of all online purchases begin with a search and this is where your customers will start their research.
You may already be doing SEO to attract visitors to your website but are you attracting the right kind and is your sales engine in place? SEO is brilliant but it needs to be part of a much larger strategy.
Create Content that Google loves
Forget link building to rank well in the search engines, you need to have remarkable content. Who decides what remarkable content is? Well at the end of the day it is not the search engines that make this decision it is your customers.
Google is looking to serve the best results it can based on what people are searching for so if you create great content that your prospects and customers love then Google will want to rank it in search.
There is a little more to it than that but if you do nothing else in terms of SEO, create remarkable content. When it comes to keywords I say forget keywords and think more about topics. What topics are your prospects interested in? Write about them.
If you do link building then please stop, it is a time consuming task that produces little results, you want to be doing link earning and the best way to do that is with great customer focused content.
Follow best practices for page visibility in search
It is paramount that you create great content but if the search engines cannot access your content then no one will find it to read it. This is why you need to make sure your content is properly optimised for SEO.
This is a lot simpler that it sounds. As long as search engines can index your pages then your content has a great chance of showing up in the search results.
Using keywords in your content is another great way to get your content ranked, but be careful and don’t get overly obsessed with keywords.
The best thing to do here is to write content based on topics instead of keywords as these will naturally have the right kind of keyword in them.
Do your research and include the words people use when searching for your content. If you do this then there isn’t really anything else you need to do here.
There are some advanced SEO changes you can make to your site but for the most part as long as you are creating great content regularly and search engines can find it then this is really all you need to do.
Conclusion
By creating content that your target market loves you have already taken a massive step to having SEO success. If you create content that your buyer personas love then Google will love it too.
Just remember to make sure your website is easy to find by Google and that the pages on your website make it easy for Google to understand what they are about. Try to focus on topics rather than keywords and you will start to build a steady stream of leads and customers.
Now it’s your turn
What are the biggest challenges your business faces when showing up for your topics in search engines? Let me know in the comments below.