Contrary to popular belief, SEO is far from dead. In fact, it’s actually more relevant than it’s ever been as if you haven’t noticed, pretty much everything you do online is in some way dependent on search engines.
The only difference these days being that successful SEO strategies mean taking into account every big change since Google ousted Penguin back in 2012. This was the time when they officially declared that user experience would represent the primary focus going forward – SEO becoming more about delivering the goods than cheating the system.
Admittedly, very little of the above probably comes as real news to you. Nevertheless, it’s a proven fact that most businesses these days are still focusing too much on the mechanics of SEO, rather than its effects and purpose. Get it right and your SEO strategy can score a double hit, earning big points with the major search engines and human users at the same time.
A difficult balancing act to pull off? It doesn’t have to be – just work in accordance with the following tips:
1 – Step Into Their Shoes
First of all, the most important step in the target audience research process is to step into the shoes of your audience members and see things from their perspective. If you were out to find the services or products you are offering, what questions would you ask? What kind of approach would you take? What search terms would you use? What would put you off? What would you like to see in a landing page? It’s all fairly simple stuff and a great way of optimising your content for readers and robots at the same time.
2 – Cool It With Keywords
Search terms and keyword phrases will continue to be your friend, but the days of getting away with keyword stuffing are well and truly over. Not only are consumers these days savvy enough to spot these kinds of practices in an instant, but so too are the bots that will tear you a new one after caching any wrong doing!
3 – Accuracy And Honest
It’s one thing to bring traffic your way by making them a promise – it’s something else entirely to actually deliver on promise. The simple fact of the matter is that if there is any element of your content that isn’t relevant in accordance with you title, meta, H1, image alt tag or URL, you are inherently delivering a poor user experience.
4 – Step Up Crosslinking
Another hugely important tip for dual-benefit SEO strategies is that of stepping things up when it comes to crosslinking. By using plenty of links throughout your site to the other pages of your website, you not only make it easier to drive two-channel traffic in the right direction, but also to score a few brownie points with Google and co.
5 – Reverse Keyword Mining
Last but not least, instead of researching the most valuable and high- competition keywords in accordance with what you do and building your content accordingly, try approaching things the other way around. This basically means focusing as much of your energy as possible on the creation of outstanding content of flawless relevance, then going on to selecting keywords in accordance with your killer content.
