The best SEO campaign and high rankings won’t help you if you don’t take user behavior and preferences into consideration. It starts with things as simple as what keywords and phrases you choose to rank for. If you pick something that your ideal customers and client aren’t looking for or the phrase, your content, and your offer don’t match, that keyword ranking is doing you no good. Congrats – you just wasted time and effort.
But it goes much deeper than that. What the search engines – Google in particular – want to see is that when someone clicks on a high ranking search result matters. They want someone to click on that link, go to your site and spend some time there consuming your content. What they don’t want to see are low clicks (in comparison to other search results on that same page), or worse have someone click through to your site, hit the back button, and then go look at a different site (this is known as a Bounce and is NOT good).
What does that mean for you as a content provider? Always create your content for your target audience first. If you’re looking at a list of keywords that you want to create content around, ask yourself if a particular search term matches your audience and the content you share. If so, go ahead, if not, move on to a better keyword choice.
Then sit down and write your content for your readers first. Then, when it’s written and polished, go back and look at the title. Are you using the keyword in the title? If not, can you rework it and still have a compelling title. Remember this will be the headline that shows on social media and in the search results. The same goes for metadata like the description and the URL. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go do a google search and look at what those individual search results look like.
Last but not least scan through the content and ensure that you’re using the keyword once or twice in the content and also related words and phrases. Search engines are smart and these latent semantic keywords help them determine what your content is about.
With well-written, targeted content you will ensure that your audience clicks and sticks, which will help you move up in the search engine rankings. Not sure if that’s the kind of content you’re creating? Ask your readers if this is what they were looking for. If it isn’t, they will tell you.
True …I agree to every line. Yes, we should target the audience. We can’t write absurdly for anyone. We do that. And have 0-negligible bounce rate. Thanks Paul .
You are welcome, Shrilekha! Keep the audience in mind!
Thanks for the tips…still navigating all these things.
The more I write, I’m learning what I want my content to be about and what I don’t want. I’m trying to find my niche for myself and once I do that…I’m hoping everything else will fall into place.
Sometimes, I make things harder than it has to be and if I don’t understand it, I’ll never get it. LOL – it’s the simple things that trip me up. (looking forward to the training this afternoon).
Most people have a site that evolves over time. It is just like a business – stick with it, Nancy!
My target audience came first today, in posting……while I paid attention to my SEO and all getting the info out there to my audience was key- is that the behavior your speaking about…..I wanted my audience to be engaged and get something out of my content so they keep clicking on MY STUFF and not the other guy’s stuff. Not to sound selfish I do like to add links and have to others work and all but I need to write to an audience too!
Audience engagement is a good thing – not always possible, it seems, but something to strive for!
So very apt.We need to write for an audience and them do the SEO part right.Both needed .
Yes! Both are needed!
Hopefully, I am choosing the right keywords to avoid the dreaded bounce! Thanks for this information.
And make sure you have other info on each page that will make people click to consume more content.
Appreciate your SEO tips, Paul. There are things I “know” about SEO, but your posts prompt me to put them more into practice. Plenty of room for improvement on my end.
We all have plenty of room for improvement! Thanks, Kat!
Great tips and such a good reminder to write for your target audience. I’m glad that me and my target audience generally like same kinds of things 🙂 Makes the blogging more fun and effective. Always appreciate your simple, easy to understand and implement strategies.
Some people pick a niche that they think will make them money even though they do not like the topic. That is certainly a recipe for burnout and disaster. Stay where you are in a field you enjoy!
I have to work on adding my search words in my blog content. Very helpful blog.
Only if you wanted to be found… 🙂