Great SEO Means Serving Your Audience
Many website owners and marketing professionals are always on the lookout for the secret to great SEO. The real secret to a successful SEO campaign? Make sure everything you do is designed to serve and impact your target audience and not just the search engines.
How does serving your audience create great SEO?
1. Writing content for human readers.
Of course you want your website to do well in the search results, that’s kind of the point of SEO. But so many site owners get bogged down by trying to create the “perfect” SEO content that they forget who their content is really supposed to appeal to – their visitors! The search engines are not going to be buying your products/services, human visitors are. Ranking well in the search engines is great, getting tons of traffic is even better, but if the conversion rate just isn’t there then what’s the real value of your SEO program? It’s not just about sending more people to your site it’s about sending the right people to your site. When you write content for your audience, and not just for the search engines, you’ll do a much better job of appealing to your visitors. Most of the time, well-written content that is created with the audience in mind practically optimizes itself the first time around.
2. Building your overall online brand.
Unless you are a brand new startup that doesn’t have an established brand to fall back on, chances are many of your visitors are finding your site through branded search. SEO is designed to help people find your website that never knew about it before, and part of that involves building up your overall online brand. You don’t want to put all your SEO eggs in one basket (like only targeting one keyword) because that effectively alienates any segment of your audience that doesn’t fit into that basket. The search engines are looking at the whole picture to determine who is and who isn’t doing a good job with their SEO. Content marketing, social media marketing, online PR, video marketing and more all contribute to your overall brand and search engine trust. They also help create more unique touch points for you to interact with a customer.
3. You don’t risk long term success for short term wins.
It can be hard to focus on the long term, especially when times are tough and money is tight, but serving your audience means keeping that long term in mind. What you are doing know might not pay off right away, but a year from now it’ll have a positive impact on your business. Two years from now it’ll have an even bigger impact because your SEO will have gained momentum and taken on a life of its own. Too often site owners turn to black hat SEO to hurry things along and artificially boost results, but this doesn’t mean you’re creating a better experience for your visitor, it means you are chasing the algorithm.
4. You put your visitors first.
Before you create that “resource” page on your site, ask yourself one simple question – is this page of links actually going to help a visitor to my website? Who are you actually linking to from that resource page? A tax attorney probably shouldn’t be putting outbound links on his site to a Denver B&B. Why would any of his visitors need that information? If you are putting your visitors first it means you are building your website for them, meaning you won’t waste time building “resources” to a random website in exchange for a link from theirs. A link from an unrelated site doesn’t help your visitors. And for the record Google flat out bans link exchanges.
At the end of the day, the best SEO campaigns aren’t designed to beat the search engines; they are intended to create a great user experience for your visitors. By focusing on the needs of your visitors your SEO will take on a much more natural approach and feel, the kind that the search engines are looking to reward.
About the Author – Nick Stamoulis
Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing (http://www.brickmarketing.com), a Boston SEO company. With nearly 13 years of SEO experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting to the Brick Marketing Blog and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers.
Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com.
Image Credit: 1.
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3 Responses to “Great SEO Means Serving Your Audience”
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I’m really not sure what all the fuss is about with page optimization, SEO and the fact that content is king for SEO purposes. In the past few years I’ve played around with my own domain and Website in an attempt to get on the first page for a search phrase or a keyword for a market I was targeting. While I did have trouble reaching the 1st page position for a single keyword. My search phrase surprisingly ended up in the #1 position and held that position for over 3 years on both Google and Bing out of over 440,000,000 results and this was achieved with zero content on the site. Because of a lack of funding to fully develop the site I eventually shut it down and sat idle for over a year. In the last few days I’ve decided to put the domain up for sale but instead of listing the domain with a domain reseller or the like. I figured since I was able to obtain #1 position for the market the domain was designed for was there a possibility of reaching that position once again? I created a static web page with very little content and a contact form. My results were for 2 keywords 6th position on Bing out of 438,000,000 results and 3rd page out of 229,000,000 on Google in less then 1 week of uploading the page and sparse content. How is it possible that I can achieve such a high ranking on a site with little to no content and rank higher then my competition.
yeah, it is a great post for the seo lovers that really work on this field and they work with happiness and know the appropriate technology to make a site om top of the searches in the web.
i really appreciate these types of post that communicate the view of the peoples in this tech ERA.
This is a great post to read it tells us what importance a seo plays in every successful website. In this post how seo struggled sooo hard so that he can achieve the higtest on his site.one who want to know what role a seo plays must read this blog.
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