Business Bullets - Marketing

The practice of Search Engine Optimisation has been with us for over a decade now, but we need to be careful that we do not promote our businesses online 'like it is 2004' as digital marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk would put it.

This article is a transcript of some of the advice shared during a recent Search Engine Optimisation masterclass. I hope you find it helpful.

If you are disappointed by the lack of traffic to your website from the search engines, it may be that...

1. You are too worried about the search engines...

A very odd statement I agree but a very important one. Your job is not to try and please the search engines with some kind of clever reverse engineering. Your job is to please your online visitors by providing them with the content they are looking for.

The likely situation is that your content is not diverse enough and not matching the range of potential visitors to your website.

Thanks to data shared by Google and Yahoo, we now know that visitors fall into two main categories:

1. Buyers, who are ready to make an enquiry and look for a specific set of information.
2. Researchers, who are just looking for help and advice in order to make a future buying decision.

As a direct result, websites around the world have adapted to match the needs of the visitors by creating two types of content:

1. Promotional content for the Buyers which will include details of products and services, testimonials, biographies and contact details
2. Educational content for the Researchers which will include free downloads, news updates, top tips, FAQs, etc.

To add to this new approach we also nee to consider the searching behaviour, and therefore the words used by our Buyers and Researchers:

- The Expert Searcher: they will enter words on Google. Yahoo or Bing which are exactly the words that you use to describe your products and services;

- The Casual Searcher: they do not know the exact words so they will paraphrase or use descriptive words to illustrate what they are trying to achieve;

- The Interrogator: they will enter questions on their favourite search engine using the 5 Ws or 'How to...' in order to find answers;

Now that we understand the diversity of our future online visitors we need to align our website content accordingly.

We will begin by researching the keywords they use the smarter way and I thought I would share with you a practical exercise.

To get the most out this activity I recommend you follow these steps:

1. Watch this video and make your own notes on how to use Google Instant, UberSuggest and TagCrowd.
2. Download 'Researching Keywords The Smart Way Template' to help you record your keywords research results.
3. Select the keywords you would like to use on your website and expand your content accordingly with refreshed or new webpages.

Any questions please do get in touch!

In Part 2, we will explore the other two reasons your SEO may not be working:

2. You are too worried about backlinks.

3. You don't have a plan!