Every website could use an increase in traffic to get new clients in the door. Optimizing your website to drive targeted traffic is one of the least expensive options when you consider the return on investment. If you don't want to pay for SEO services and want to optimize your site yourself, follow this basic guideline to producing pages that get more visitors to your site by conducting your own SEO campaign.
Establish the "why"
Before writing tons of pages and publishing content establish the "why" of your campaign by making a goal. The more defined and detailed your goal is for your company, the clearer your objectives become in order to achieve your goal. This makes decisions easier for choosing your keyword and deciding on content and promotion strategies.
Create the perfect client
You can't possibly connect with your clients at a meaningful level through the content you create unless you are writing specifically for them. The current model for creating quality content that ranks highly in the search results is to provide the user with a solution that satisfies the search intent. As an exercise, create the perfect client as the first step in your SEO campaign.
Think of as many details about the perfect client for your business as possible to encourage creative thoughts about how you will write your content. The important details would start with age, job, income, gender, marital status, lifestyle habits and anything that would enhance their persona. The idea is to get a good grasp on who this person is in order for you to effectively communicate how your services or products benefit them.
Establishing search intent
Publishing amazing content on a consistent basis begins with great research. The concept of search intent has been a very big issue since search engines began extracting meaning from pages. To satisfy search intent you need to make sure your content includes the expected information that will leave a user satisfied with your solution.
Find the most appropriate search term
Based on your buyer persona, make a list of the potential search terms they might be using to search for what your company offers. Take each of those phrases and type them into Google's search box. Write down all of the suggestions that appear in the drop-down box below.
Alternatively, you can search each phrase on your list and scroll down to see the terms that are listed in "People also search" for more keyword ideas. Why not take suggestions for popular searches from Google itself? Repeat this for each keyword on your list until you have a complete set of search terms that are highly relevant to your offering.
Use a keyword tool of your choice to search to get a good idea of the search volume of your keywords. There are great paid options such as Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush. For the free option try Ubersuggest and get the values for monthly traffic and keyword difficulty. Choose the keyword that best describes your product with a good balance between the most traffic and least competition.
Research what clients are experiencing first hand
One characteristic of effective, engaging content is that it provides value to readers by solving a problem they have in their lives. There are the obvious issues that surround your keyword topic but researching the problems people have firsthand can lift the quality of your content tremendously.
Use social websites and forums to uncover conversation threads with people voicing concerns or opinions or most importantly asking for help on your keyword topic. Reddit is an example of a website that has a group dedicated to almost every topic you can possibly think of in which you can find multiple threads of conversations related to your keyword. Scanning for threads that start with questions or have "Help!" in the title is an easy way to spot good topics that will resonate with your audience.
Plan your content strategy
It might seem underhanded but one of the items you are tasked with is scouting your competition to get an idea of what they have done to rank their page. Take note of the number of topics covered, images, videos, word count, and the number of referring domains attached to their content. You may not need to outperform them in all categories but why not do it anyway and create a piece of content that sets a new standard in quality for your keyword topic.
You can get most of the information you need by installing the MozBar extension. When you land on a site the MozBar will display the page authority (PA), domain authority (DA), the number of links, and a summary of the heading tags as well as the number of characters in each category.
Once you have published your content you can start pushing the pages ranking toward the first page of results by linking from high-authority websites. Acquiring backlinks from websites that are in a similar niche and publish content related to yours will complete the optimization of your page.
Guest posting is considered a white hat link building technique in which you can acquire quality links from websites with high domain authority. The only thing you need is a high-quality article that meets the criteria of blog sites that offer guest posting. Search for lists that group sites by category such as icopify.com, to find websites in your niche that publish your content.
Acquiring links from high authority sites will help establish credibility to your newly published content as well as provide referral traffic to your site. With enough links from credible sites, your page will grow in authority which increases your ability to outrank your competition.
There's no length of time associated with how long it takes to see results but an SEO campaign is typically a long term strategy. By following the basic steps for creating well planned, optimized pages you can drive more targeted visitors to your site.
Christian Carere is an SEO expert in Toronto and the founder of Digital Ducats Inc. Christian offers search engine optimization services to SMB's to improve the number of leads and new clients generated on a regular basis.
