SEO Campaigns: Are You Really Targeting Your Audience?

by Chris Gregory | Feb 12, 2019

Here are three ways in which it’s easy to get off track, along with insights into how to make sure you’re really connecting with your target audiences through the SEO strategies you’re using.

Keyword Research Intent

Your marketing director may know the technical aspects of finding keywords through research and may know how to use them in copy. But, if you don’t take a step back to consider a searcher’s intent in using a certain keyword, then your SEO strategy may be off-kilter from the start.

As one example, let’s say that you’re in the lumber business, and you’ve found this keyword: “Can you stain cherry wood?” It’s got 90 searches a month and you figure this would be a great blog post title. Is it? Well, it depends upon your customer. If, for example, you sell to companies with experience in making furniture, they already know the answer. So, if they saw this type of content on your site, they might feel as though you don’t understand their needs, a disconnect that you definitely don’t want to foster.

On the other hand, if you also take that lumber and manufacture unstained jewelry boxes, knick-knack shelving, footstools and other assorted trinkets to sell directly to consumers, then you might very well want to educate your customers on how they can stain the cherry wood products you sell. Maybe you even cross-sell the stains!

How this plays out varies by industry, of course, but it’s crucial that you analyze the keywords you find from your customer’s point of view. The fact that a question is searched upon is a great step one in your keyword strategy, but what really matters is whether or not your customers would search upon this and want to know the answer. Whenever you’re not sure, ask the people in your company who directly deal with customers, and find out what questions they’re being asked.

Also think about what lingo your customers would typically use. Let’s say you have a law-related business and you find that 320 people a month search on “de facto law.” If your business is prepping law students for upcoming bar exams, then that might be of real interest to them. If you offer legal services to people in your state, though, it’s not likely to draw the right kind of traffic to your site. They want you to help them in the situations they’re in.

Along that same vein, let’s say you sell fairly techy B2B components. Then, the depth of IT lingo you use on your site should depend upon who, exactly, is typically charged with choosing suppliers in the types of companies that buy your products. If you know that your sales team often deals directly with the people in IT departments, then use more technical language. If you sell more to corporate buyers, use less.

Content Creation

As another B2B example, as you create service pages, again be ultra-aware of who within the company is likely to buy your products—and then write your informational and sales copy accordingly. Let’s say that you sell blue widgets with highly technical specifications to manufacturers, but you know that you deal more directly with company executives who don’t have as much technical know-how as their engineers do.

In that case, ensure that the benefits you’re listing in your services/sales pages are ones that would satisfy requirements of company execs, quantifying the benefits as much as you can. For example, if you want to share the quality of your products, that’s great—so include how the long-lasting nature of your blue widgets means that companies need to replace them 47 percent less often when compared to your competitors, saving the average purchaser X amount of dollars per year. Let them know about your service guarantees, including a case study that shows how much that benefits your average customer. Those are the kind of benefits that executives want to understand and compare.

Then, as one of your benefits, include high-level technical specs and link to a page that lists them in detail so that the executives can share the information with their IT and engineering teams before making a purchase. Include a download on that page that makes it super easy for the executives to share the technical benefits of your blue widgets. That way, the IT team has the option of evaluating your product’s technical benefits in language that satisfies their needs.

Link Building

The best link building campaigns tend to be multi-faceted and, in many regards, are similar among industries. In one way, though, they’re very industry specific—and that’s when you get your website listed in industry-specific directories of quality.

Dental business, for example, should investigate the American Dental Association site, while label-makers should look into ThomasNet.com, wedding videographers should investigate WeddingWire.com, and so forth. There are plenty of industry-specific directories available for lawyers, doctors, and more.

You’ll want to discern which higher-profile bloggers and journalists write about what you offer and build relationships with them. That way, when you create a valuable piece of content, you’ll know whom to contact to ask if they’d like to share that information on their own sites and link back to yours.

Bottom Line

Yes, there are plenty of foundational pieces of SEO campaigns that are largely the same from industry to industry but, as this post hopefully shows, it’s also important to get industry and niche specific to truly target your audience and glean the organic traffic you desire.

Organic SEO vs. Local SEO: Which Do I Need?

by Chris Gregory | Sep 4, 2018

Each of these digital marketing disciplines — organic SEO and local SEO — involves boosting online visibility for businesses and their websites. In other words, both strategies focus on making websites easy to find when potential customers search for relevant products and services of a business. Each discipline comes with its own distinct strategies and techniques and, when strategies for organic and local SEO dovetail with one another, they can become even more powerful.

Organic SEO

Components of organic SEO include selecting relevant keywords for a website that have reasonable levels of traffic with achievable levels of competition. These keywords are then used in page and blog copy, tags (title, meta description and H), internal links and so forth to send signals to the search engines about what keywords are important on that URL in particular and the site, overall.

Optimizing for keywords, though, is not enough. It’s important to also have a diverse set of quality inbound links pointing to a site. In addition to using common SEO tactics to improve your website’s ranking, you should also ensure that your site is well structured and easy to use. Equally as important, make sure the website aids in converting traffic into sales.

As part of organic SEO, it’s important to rank well for keywords that are appropriately paired with the locations of brick and mortar stores, if applicable, so strategically using geotargeted keywords (for example, Jacksonville blue widgets) is crucial. And, this is the point at which organic SEO and local SEO intersect.

Local SEO

A primary goal of local SEO is to have a website place well in the Google Maps local pack for relevant keywords. Not all keywords trigger a local map — only the ones that Google determines have local intent, such as for a pizza parlor or an attorney, a dentist or an ice cream stand.

When a local map does appear for a term, Google is currently showing three listings (the three-pack) and then a “More places” link. Ideally, you want your site to appear in the three-pack. To help make that happen, local SEO strategies include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Google My Business (GMB) optimization
• Google reviews
• Citation strategies, which involves verifying name, address and phone information wherever listed online, and correcting errors whenever possible

Local SEO became a unique discipline in 2005 by starting to distinguish itself as a separate branch of SEO. That’s when Google released its Local Business Center and then combined that center with its Google Maps. Although, as searchers, we now take this convenience for granted, that’s when we began to be able to access store information, including hours and contact information, with driving directions and more in one spot.

You can find more information about local SEO strategies here.

Strategic Synergy

Although organic SEO and local SEO each have unique features, commonalities exist, including:

• Keyword research is essential for both, with organic SEO requiring a broader strategy and local SEO focusing on more niche ones.
• Location pages on a website play a key role in both disciplines, as they can appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) as well provide key signals to help the site appear in Google three-packs for relevant keywords.
• Online optimization is important for each, with NAP consistency central to local SEO.
• Schema, a specialized form of HTML coding, helps Google “understand” the purposes of content; one area of specialization is for NAP, as one example, while another is for online reviews shared on the site.

Reverse Engineering Rankings

To rank well organically, it’s important to create keyword-rich content that engages readers, and to optimize back end tags and new URLs, to steadily increase the number of inbound links and so forth. Creating a quality user experience is also important, which includes (but is not limited to) boosting page speed. You can find more about organic SEO ranking factors in 2018 at Moz.com.

Ranking factors for local search, though, are somewhat different, focused on “relevance, distance, and prominence,” according to Google. “These factors are combined to help find the best match for your search. For example, Google algorithms might decide that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer, and therefore rank it higher in local results.”

To become more relevant, it’s important to comprehensively provide local information about the business. That’s because, the more easily Google can match your business and site with prospects searching for your products or services, the more often this will likely happen.

Distance is an important factor in local search, and Google will look at geotargeted terms used in a searcher’s query and then compare potential search results and their distance from the person. If the searcher doesn’t use a location-specific term, Google will still use what is known about that location when offering up results.

Then there is prominence. Being a well-known brand never hurts. But, even if you’re not a well-established brand, you can build a quality online presence to boost your authority signals. This can include regularly getting Google reviews, building relevant links and citations and more.

Clearing Up Misconceptions

People new to SEO sometimes have misconceptions about local SEO. As one of the most common examples, they might associate “local” with step one and “organic” as a broader step two. In fact, the most powerful SEO campaigns focus on how these two disciplines can be used in tandem to gain the most powerful online presence possible, being found right where potential customers are searching.

So, as a final piece of advice, we recommend you create a customized SEO strategy for your site that, from its inception, includes a focus on both local SEO and organic SEO.

Patience: The Foundation of Successful SEO Campaigns

by Chris Gregory | Jul 17, 2018

It’s only natural, when you start an SEO campaign, to be eager to see results. After all, you’re investing time, money and energy into making your business more visible online. But, when you become impatient, it’s easy to rush through important steps, which almost always hinders the overall success of your SEO efforts.

How can you tell the difference, though, between being ultra-efficient and rushing through SEO actions too quickly? How can you tell if your SEO isn’t working or if your campaign simply needs more time to succeed?

Here are four practical tips to keep your campaign on track and to protect it from the harm that can come from too much impatience.

Know Your Competition

Before you begin any organic SEO campaign, it’s crucial to be realistic about the pace in which you can achieve your desired keyword rankings. What’s realistic, of course, depends upon your online competition.

It may help to compare increasing your keyword rankings to a race that you run (an ironic analogy, for sure, when we’re encouraging patience). Still, the analogy can help. Let’s say, for example, you want to rank well for “commercial lawn care services.” But, plenty of competitors have been focusing on that term for quite some time. This means that, while you’re still at the starting line, they’re already further along on the racetrack.

This doesn’t mean you can’t catch up to your competitors. But, like in a foot race, one or more of these things must occur to allow you to close the gap:

1. Your competitor quits competing and rests on its laurels; that could happen, but don’t count on that as your central SEO strategy.
2. You run faster than your competitor; that can definitely help to close the gap, and, with SEO, you can compare running more quickly with investing more into your campaign.
3. You run harder than your competitor; you can compare this to working harder with SEO, perhaps by using the keywords in more content than competitors.
4. You run smarter than your competitor; this is comparable to being more strategic with your SEO campaign.

Here’s the bottom line: You must know your competition and plan your SEO strategies accordingly.

Don’t Quit

Assuming you’ve got a solid foundational strategy, you then need to be:

• Persistent
• Adaptable

You’ll need to test your strategies, monitor results, and tweak as needed, repeating this pattern for as long as it takes.

And, you’re probably wondering approximately how long it will take to rank for a desired keyword. Although there are no hard-and-fast answers, Ahrefs.com randomly selected two million keywords and monitored how long it took for each to rank in the top ten in Google, as well as to rank number one. Results published in 2017 are as follows:

• The average top ten ranking took two years.
• The average number one ranking took almost three years.

Results will vary, depending upon the levels of competition, but patience. Patience is key.

Now, to use another sports analogy (football, this time), once you reach your desired rankings, you’ll need to switch from being on the offensive, pushing hard to get the rankings, to being on the defensive. That’s because other eager companies would be happy to take your hard-earned rankings from you, and you need to protect your turf.

Don’t Let Impatience = Taking Shortcuts

Although investing more resources into your SEO can make good sense, taking shortcuts can be foolish. For example, let’s look at link building campaigns. You know that links are important to rankings and you know (by following our tip #1) your competitors have plenty of them. So, it’s tempting to be super-aggressive in getting your own.

But, when you try to get as many links as you can as fast as you can, the links probably won’t be of the best quality. And, to have a good inbound link profile, it’s important to have quality links from diverse yet relevant sources. By being too impatient, you might create a spammy link profile, which will likely do your site and business more harm than good.

Instead, create relevant, keyword-rich content that people will want to link to. Promote that content, including through reaching out to relevant influencers who might be willing to share your content, and further expand your digital reach.

Don’t Forget Local SEO

If you have a physical location, it’s crucial to also focus on local SEO strategies. For example, you might really want to get into Google’s three-pack for “pizza delivery in Miami, Florida.”

You know that getting positive Google Reviews will help your local SEO campaign — and you see that competitors have plenty more than you do. So, you figure, if your goal is to get a total of 500 reviews, then you’ll pull out all the stops and get, say, 100 reviews a month. Then, in five months, you’ll be on top of the three-pack.

Except, it doesn’t work that way.

Google tends to reward steady progress, with a sudden influx of reviews looking pretty suspicious (that’s also true with inbound links). So, instead, create a program where you regularly reach out to satisfied customers and ask each of them to write a review about your pizza and/or your delivery service. Don’t specifically ask for a good review; instead, ask the customers you believe will provide a positive one. Make it super-easy for them to do so by creating a unique link that will take them exactly where they need to go.

Conclusion

Although we don’t agree with the “slow” part of the “slow but steady wins the race” saying, we do strongly advocate steady progress. Successful SEO programs are well planned and consistently executed. Patience, persistence and adaptability, we believe, are what really win the race!