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Hello and welcome to my favorite blog posts I write on this website, the Marketing Class! Marketing Class started back during college where I would write notes on what I learned in marketing school and publish those notes for free and has evolved into a recurring series of important blogs related to the entire world of marketing. In today’s article, I will be going over How to Build an SEO Strategy in 5 Key Questions. These will be the 5 key questions every marketing manager needs to ask themselves when building a successful SEO strategy. Let’s get started.
What does your organization make that helps solve questions of searchers?
Something about your organization is unique and comes with a level of expertise that only your organization can answer. That could be tips for doing things on their own, self-help, strategy guides, tips and tricks, etc. By starting with the questions you have the expertise to solve, you can make provide “unique value” that nobody else can provide.
What if my industry makes things people aren’t searching for?
It is possible your organization makes solutions to problems people aren’t searching for. In that circumstance, I would first ask you why SEO was your first choice of marketing strategy. However, in this circumstance, the question you are attempting to solve will be less direct and more indirect.
Say for example, that the solution you provide is “perfectly ionized water.” Nobody will be researching that, but you can find people that are searching for items like “scientifically filtered water.” So you can answer questions related to the best water filtration methods for those searches.
What do you offer that offers truly unique value for Search Queries?
When someone searches for a question, it’s usually indirectly related to a common problem they are having. For example, people that search for “scientifically filtered water” are not just looking to clean their water. They are looking to improve either their health, prevent infections or just improve the taste of their tap water.
So, here we get into what is called “Unique Value Propositions.” These are the things that make you truly unique and different in the market but also completely differentiate you from others. Every blog post you write, and every search query you attempt to rank for should attempt to tie directly to those items that only your business can solve.
Who will help us reach more of our target demographic?
In other words, Who will help you amplify and 10x your message across the internet? In most businesses, the way you grow is through word of mouth. But you can actually strategize and answer the question of “how do we get better word of mouth” in a number of ways including:
- Review marketing
- Referral discounts
- Social Media Marketing
- Blog Backling strategy
If we don’t have the people that are “in the front lines” of our target demographic actively amplifying our message, we will do a lot of the manual labor ourselves. Answering this question can make or break an SEO strategy quickly if other bloggers or other businesses are not actively amplifying your message.
Ask yourself “Who influences our customers” to find the best places to get extreme amplification quickly for your business.
What is your process for turning visitors from search into customers?
Put very simply, if you don’t have an answer for this question you don’t have a good SEO marketing strategy. Visitors that come to your website should have a very quick and easy way to become either a subscriber, customer, or lead. This is often referred to as a conversion rate optimization process.
How should you start to improve your conversion rate?
I recommend starting with one thing. It can be easy to overcomplicate your SEO strategy with too many calls to action, too many customer acquisition strategies, and far too many “goals” in mind that do not serve to help you make progress, but instead serve to create a serious headache for your marketing team.
You can start with a simple landing page that can be linked to any page your website visitors come from, and that applies to everything or anything your business does. Starting with this can give you a “catch-all” page where you can be confident in sending website traffic to even if you offer dozens of products or services.
How do we expose what we do that engines can easily crawl, index, and show off to our potential customers?
This gets into more traditional SEO strategy but here’s the skinny: you can have a beautiful website or app, but if Google doesn’t know what it’s about then it’s not effectively serving your SEO strategy. Search engines are robots, not people. Unfortunately, one mistake I see people making over and over is designing their website in a way that is very pretty, but not very SEO effective.
How to optimize your web content for search engines?
There are a few tried and true recommendations you can follow to optimize your website content for search engines. Below are some tips I keep in mind when writing my blog posts.
- Write posts for both people and for robots!
- Create a business page listing (Google My Business)
- Avoid using AI to write your content for you.
Why do I say you should write posts for both people and robots? Because search engines rank your website based on how people experience your website! But the way Google ranks your content is with robots. One good example of addressing this problem is by using headings instead of images to organize your posts.
Why you should avoid only using images to communicate your value
One bit of SEO advice I see on the internet is to make sure you are using images with alt text on them. But I frequently see images being used instead of headings which is a big mistake. Always keep in mind that robots are what index your website and robots cannot see images!
Why you should create a Google My Business page
Google My Business is a simple setup you can implement for your business that puts it right at the very top of local search results, and even regional search results.
A GMB (Google My Business) page will effectively act as a replacement “Top of page” search engine result that you have complete control of. This is exceedingly rare and having that real estate at the top of google is incomparable.
Why you should avoid using AI to write your content for you
This is a big one. Many people are very excited by the growth of AI content writers like copy.ai, rytr.me, or ChatGPT. These AI tools are awesome at bringing the power of copywriting to lots of people all over the internet, but they should never be used without discretion.
AI tools have a tendency to make mistakes, and if you aren’t careful, those mistakes can cost you valuable search engine results. That’s why I use rytr.me with Semrush for SEO, then spend a lot of time reviewing articles that are outlined by SEO AI before I let them publish on my website.
So here I want to give you a quick pitch. If you are looking to improve your online discoverability, I offer marketing-focused web design services on WordPress and Shopify to help you optimize your website for search engines, social media marketing, paid advertising, and more. If you are interested, please consider reaching out to work with me.
Thanks for reading to the end of this post. If you find the information I provide to be helpful, you may want to consider working with me as your web designer or marketing consultant.
My expertise is in WordPress, and Shopify Marketing Optimized Web Design that leads perfectly into SEO, Social Media, and PPC Marketing campaigns. If you are interested in working with me, please fill out the request form below!
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