SEO is still one of the key priorities for both B2B and B2C companies to drive traffic to your website. However, over the years, we have regularly encountered companies who have approached the process incorrectly. Therefore, here are a few tips to help ensure you start off on the right foot;

 

Understanding your audience

This is extremely important. Far too often we come across websites that either don’t appear to target an audience or target the wrong people.  Depending on the nature of your business, there can be many different types of audience, and they can also be at different steps along a buying cycle.

Audience

So before you even start the SEO process, think about the type of visitors you want to come to your website, and what you want to gain from them during this visit.

This is an extremely important process and will help immensely when you come to keyphrase/keyword research.

Technical SEO Audit

Once you have identified your audience but before you start the keyphrase /keyword analysis you should audit your website.  We would initially run a technical analysis of your website to ensure that there are no issues that would hinder search engine results and/or affect user experience.  This should cover everything from website speed, ease of navigation, usability on different devices, broken link auditing, problems on Google Webmaster Console etc.

Keyphrase/Keyword Analysis

Now that you have an understanding of your audience and know that your website is “technically clean”, you can address the keyphrase/keyword analysis.  This is the process of selecting the phrases your target audience will use to find your products, services and other content.  This is an extremely important area of SEO and is covered in more detail in our SEO lessons.

Content Audit

Once you have selected the keyphrases/keywords for your website, you can revisit your on-page content.  Bear in mind that different pages on your website should serve audiences at different stages of a buying cycle.  i.e. Product pages intent on serving those who are ready to buy, whilst blog posts and news articles aim to assist those who are conducting research etc.
Content-Marketing

The content on your website is an important part of SEO and, again, has it’s own section in our SEO Lessons.

Competitor Analysis

In both SEO and business in general, you should obviously know and understand your competitors and their marketing strategies.  From an SEO perspective we focus on their:

  • Keyphrases/keywords and website content – to understand where they see their audience;
  • Site design – to understand how they work on converting visitors to customers;
  • Link Profile – to understand their online marketing strategy for both search and website traffic.
  • Social media activity – to develop an understanding of their company and target audience among other things.

Conclusion

All of the above should be considered both before and during optimisation of your website for search engines, and for marketing your website in general.

Combine this with our SEO lessons and you will be on track for online marketing success.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact Jon Seymour: 01492 460 460, jon@janklin.com.