SEO Digital Marketing
As part of any digital marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is integral to driving customers to your business via online platforms. Effective marketing demands it.What is SEO?
SEO is a collection of tools and best practices that help your website rank higher in search engine results, thereby driving more traffic to your site and potentially more business.
However, although SEO once involved adding keywords to your site for search engines to find, SEO in 2018 is far more complex and involves a much broader scope of considerations.
Nowadays SEO is a full-time job for small businesses and many are turning to website design and marketing experts such as Pronto for support.
How to Create an SEO strategy
Forget what you think you know about SEO and start thinking about it as an ever-evolving field. As users’ behaviors and search engines’ capabilities develop over time, standards come and go in the blink of an eye.
Assuming you can skip SEO and just 'wing-it' might keep you from reaching your full business potential.
It’s not just the online marketing industry that’s evolving; your business’s industry is also maturing. So when it comes to SEO, you really can’t “set it and forget it.” You need to be monitoring and tracking how well everything is working so you’re always one step ahead of the competition.
Here are a few points you need to consider when working out an SEO strategy
Who is in your target market?
SEO today is not about just grabbing as much traffic as possible, but instead attracting high-value visitors interested in what you offer. In terms of demographics, what is your digital market searching for? How are they performing web searches? Where are they located? The more specific your answers, the more valuable your investments in SEO become.Google Analytics is a good place to start your investigations
Define Your Target Audience & Their Interests
The first step in most marketing campaigns, Search Marketing included, is to start by defining your target audience. Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to.
Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations, and especially their needs (aka pain points). Check out usability.gov’s description of personal task analysis more details, or better yet
What we want to zero in on for our SEO Strategy are those pain points. What do they want? What are their needs that aren’t being met? Knowing these things will help us better define a content strategy and prioritize content to bring to the forefront.
Two reasons why you should start with the audience needs:
Content Strategy:
You want to provide content and tools that are as relevant and useful as possible to your target audiences. This goes beyond regular SEO practices and into site strategy, although providing relevant, useful content in itself is linkbait.
For example, let’s say I have a health site. I have several types of articles on health, drug information, and information on types of diseases and conditions. My angle on the site is that I’m targeting seniors. If I find out seniors are primarily interested in information on prescription drug plans and cheap blood pressure medication, then I know that I want to provide information specifically on those things. This allows me to hone in on that market’s needs and de-prioritize or bypass other content.
