SEO Help: Why your website needs to be optimized

Looking for SEO help is not such a daunting task when you understand why you need it. The video above is really useful information regarding SEO and is produced from Google themselves.  Once you hear how they see your site please continue to read about the reasons your website needs to be optimized.

Q) What is Search Engine Optimization and why you need it?
 
Your inbound marketing starts with Strangers.  These are people that don’t yet know about your website or might not even know about your industry.   We want these strangers to become Visitors; to have them see and read your content.  The next step is to convert these visitors into customers into leads that are interested in your product/service.  Knowing who you are needing SEO help for will help the whole process run smoother.
 
Customers are great but not enough these days, we want to make them so happy that they become promoters of your brand; we want them to spread the word.

Webster describes OPTIMIZATION a Noun: An act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional or effective as possible.

For your website this means creating or setting up your site to be successful.

Two areas to consider, first – How do you get people to your website and second, what do you do with them once they get there?

Your company’s goals come into play when you are talking optimization.  You may just focus on different types of optimization. Example, some companies may just want more leads so they will focus on conversion or your company may just want more social media conversion so you may focus on social media heavily.

If you don’t optimize then you will not attract or convert, period

Q) Who are you optimizing your site for?

Most site owners believe the most important factor is optimizing for the search engines and while that is it correct that you need to optimize to be found, your first goal should always be optimizing for website visitors and then for search engines.

Remember, the search engines are not going to buy your services or products.

More visitors to your site means more opportunities to convert to customers.  We want to get not just any visitors though; we want to get the right ones.

To get the right visitors you need to focus on buyer personas.

Take the time to create and understand your buyer persona, it will make you a better marketer and your end results will be increased. Understanding your buyer personas will save you time, money and resources in the long haul.

The second way we optimize a site is for search engines.  Ignoring the search engines is just a bad idea.  Google alone logs over 2 billion searches a day.  You want to be on that first page when a search for your brand/product is typed in.

People do searches for many reasons.   While it’s true that searches for videos, pictures of puppies or sports scores are going on; when people are searching online they are searching for answers to their personal and business problems.  They are searching to solve their problems. 

Over 78% of the searches that users click are NOT paid, they are organic.  Google has become very good at delivering what the searchers are looking for.  They improve this technology every day.  Because of this, over 82% of users never leave the first page of the search results.  Ask yourself how YOU surf the web.  Do you often scroll past the first page?  Most times if what you're searching for is not on the first page a user will refine their search rather than click to the next page.

SEO Help

How to optimize your website
 
Keeping in mind the two main focus points of your site.  You want understand and prioritize your buyer personas and then build your website so your visitors experience speaks to them and the search engines.

After you have done your research you may have more than one persona.  Break down the various personas that you are talking to.  If you do this correctly you will develop clear personas that will be interested in what you have to say.  Once you have this down you will be able to see that some personas are more lucrative than others and you will be able to focus your blogs, offers and campaigns around these personas.
Building the right website, the one that speaks to your customer persona takes a lot of thought.  You need to spend the time to think this through.

Traffic is great only if you do something with it.  What do you want your visitors to remember?  Maya angelou once said “I’ve learned the people forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”  This is so true when we are talking about a customer relationship.  SEO is really about getting your website to produce a feeling with your customers.

Disney is a great example of a business that sells the “experience”.   Disney talks little about the rides, the food, or the gift shops; they talk about the “feeling” of being at Disney.   They do a great job of this.  One good way to start this “feeling” is with your company’s story.  Make it personal, give the human element to your company, don’t talk is industry jargon.   By telling a story that your customer can relate to and understand you show them that you care about what’s important to them, you know their pain and you understand how to resolve their issues.

Key to the Experience is

    1 Content – guidance to the next logical step
    2 Design – Simple, easy to navigate, and color schemes
    3 Optimization – Keywords that attract visitors and search engines
 
Content

Everything that is found on a page is content.  Meaning the words, the images, the videos. You want to stay focused on one thing for every page.  Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this page?”  Design around that propose and constantly go back to the question “does this page accomplish its purpose”.  Too many times in the development of a page people get lost in trying to fit too much on a page or even get completely lost in the goal of that page. 
 
Create an excel or word document for each page before you design the site.  Ask these questions:

     What is the goal of this page?
     Is there a next logical step for users to follow?
     Do the content, images, and videos create the feeling we want our users to have?

Don’t make people think, build your site to guild them through the process.

Design

Simple and clean, easy to navigate and color schemes that speak to your customer persona.  A website for a doctor’s office will most certainly have a different feel than say a site for a night club.

Look at your site through the eyes of that persona that you build for your customers.

Early in collage I had a professor explain a disease that we all suffer from and is very easy to be blinded by.  The disease is called the “be like me disease”.  Let me explain more about this.  Even in your own field you have areas that you like and don’t like.  Let’s pretend that you are a sports site. You personally are very into sports and have concrete ideas on what speaks to you.  Let’s say that you, personally, would never use an entry level set of gear.  You can’t understand anyone that does and so you disregard those people that are looking to experience your sport for their own experience.   Everything on your site is geared for the professional skier just like you.

What you have done is made a very short list of potential customers by speaking only about the gear you like and use.  Go back to the persona or personas and think like them.

I saw this “be like me disease” in my own family.   My son is an avid motocross rider and had opened a Motorcycle apparel and repair shop.  I was so excited to go down and help support his sales until I spent a few minutes looking over the clothes he has for women.   I wanted to buy something but every piece of clothing was size 1 or zero.   I asked him where the adult clothes were and he told me that he only bought clothing for the type of body style he was attracted to.  I was floored.  Needless to say, not only did I not buy anything then or ever from the store but he lost a great deal of business in general due to how he made the women shoppers feel when they were in his store.

Step away from yourself.  Step into the shoes of YOUR customers.  If you sell pizza but you only like anchovies so you push the joys of anchovies, target all your offers to anchovies and your whole first page of the menu is about anchovies, then you have lost any customers that don’t have that same desire.  

Now it’s time to work with Keywords.  Most people think of keywords as search engine terms only.  This is important but we are talking about keywords for your visitors.  You want to quickly give them the feeling that they did indeed pick the right site.  You want them to see the information or at least the overview of what they were looking for to begin with.

This is all about ON-Page SEO; you are looking for consistency for your buyer personas as well as ease of crawling for the search engines.  (Crawling refers to the search engines getting in all your website pages and determining what is there, so that when a user searches for a product or service that matches what you have to offer you can be considered as one of the results.)

Your keywords should be focused around attracting your visitors; you want to look at 3 things;

     1 Select quality keywords that your buyer personas use.
     2 Structure your pages to make your topic or keyword easy to understand.
     3 Having structured pages using keywords make it easy to crawl.

The most important elements for on-page SEO are;

 Page Title
 URLs
 Page Headers referred to H1
 Content
 Meta Description

Current ranking has over 200 factors.  Some we can’t control so for those we can control it is critical that we do.

Did you find the SEO Help you were looking for in this article?  If not please contact our office and we get a bit deeper into how your business would best optimize your site.  719 302 5029.

Complete Web Solutions is here to help you from the concept to completion.  Do you want to talk more? Call or use our appointment scheduler to set up a no cost, no obligation consultation.