Have you ever considered building a house? Yes, your own house. You’re probably thinking ‘Why on earth would I ever want to build a house, it’s the most complicated thing ever!’ Well, that is true, if you do not have any knowledge or experience building one. Not to worry, neither do we! But we think it will be a refreshing way of you learning the Basics of SEO if you build your very own ‘SEO Home’.
Once things come together you’ll see that in fact SEO is not any different from building a house from scratch. From house planning to execution, to what goes inside of the house and out, the principals are the same. We will take you step by step through how you can not only build your own SEO home but do a brilliant job at it!
Step 1: Keyword Research & Personas (Learn and develop house-building skills)
Engaging in something you’re not familiar with can be both daunting and intimidating at the same time! Think of the first time you were behind the wheel, or your first day of school (talk about nostalgia!). Learning how to build a house from scratch is one of those things that requires knowledge, research and preparation or everything else could just fall apart…
Well, it isn’t any different with keyword research and personas. Keyword Research at its very heart involves discovering which phrases or terms are likely to be used by your customers online when they search for your products. Now while you may not know exactly what phrases your customers use when searching for your products, you may have an idea of what they want according to your products and services.
Generating a long list of keywords and selecting the best one, no longer works.. Consider the fact that each and every one of your clients are different, what works for the one will not work for another.
But before you can move on to finding your keywords and the different personas applicable to your customers you have to ask yourself the following:
– What services and products are we offering and who are they for? .i.e. Do your marketing research first.
– Why is it important for me to do this research? How will it assist me? It will assist you in getting to know your customers better, in that way you’ll be able to provide a better service or product for them.
– How do I go about doing my research? Don’t look further, talk to your sales personnel, your staff, and customers! Not forgetting your competitors.
Here’s an example:
Company A creates an online survey to get an idea of who their customers are and what keywords they use in search engines. In most cases a company will already have an idea of who their target audience is. Okay, so Company A gets their research information and decide to create online personas who are at different buying stages. Or simply have different buying personalities. Let’s say Company A sells cameras.
Company A’s online persona’s.
‘Charlie’ – Charlie a Computer System Analyst collects the latest gadgets, ‘tech-savvy’, follows technology related blogs, and is always the first one to come up with tech trends amongst peers. His better known as the walking ‘Tech-encyclopaedia’, ‘technology’ is his middle name.
‘Michael’ – Every money decision he makes he has to make with his financial advisor ‘Michael’. This guy is always comparing prices. He compares the price of the Samsung WB200F to the Canon Powershot SX280 and makes his decisions on the pricing of products. An accountant by profession.
‘Sandra’ – Sandra has just completed her Post-grad degree in Photography, intelligent and an ‘It Girl’. She’s social and constantly online across social media platforms. She has a strong online social personality, wants a camera that will allow her to take the best pictures to share with friends online and for her profession as an aspiring photographer. And it has to be cute for when someone else takes a pic of her holding her hip cam!
What Company A will then do is look at the different personalities and see what phrases or keywords they are likely to use when searching for their products according to the language each persona uses.
Different personalities, more than likely to be searching for the same product but using different keywords in doing so….
When crating these personalities, it’s of great use to ask these questions:
– Who are they? (Demographics)
– Where and when your customers are accessing your website.
– What are they doing on my website?
– What are they about? .i.e. Motivation, occupation, interests etc….
– Name or Nickname
– Photo of your persona.
Now that you know about how to use personas to get your SEO keywords, let’s take a look at which tools can help you select the right keywords for your SEO.
• Word Tracker – Not only does Word Tracker target keywords for your SEO campaigns but it provides support for other related features as well. This keyword tool is well-known amongst marketing and SEO personnel. It doesn’t come free though, so yes you will have to pay for a subscription.
• Freshkey – Freshkey looks up new keywords for you and provides you with information on how popular a term is (bounce rate). Although you pay for the service provided, it sounds like a valuable tool for search.
• Bing Keyword Research Tool – Bing has their own keyword research tool once you’ve signed up with the search engine. The keyword search results are organic and look at the language used, country and religion all for personalization of results.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – The Google AdWords tool is free and was made for Adwords campaigns. It can be used for both SEO initiatives and PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns. AdWords is free, you only pay for the PPC feature.
• You Tube Keyword Tool – This tool is totally free and helps in content marketing campaigns where videos content and description keywords are identified to give you the best possibly high ranked videos.
• Word Stream – Is a subscription based keyword research tool which only allows you 30 free keyword searches. The Word Stream allows you to niche your search or allow for a more general one. This keyword research tool further suggestions and groups words for you as well.
Now that you’ve gone through the different Keyword Research Tools which can assist you in finding the ideal keywords for your SEO, let us briefly take a look at things to AVOID when researching your keywords.
Common mistakes made in SEO keyword research:
– Only doing keyword research once. Your keywords need to be regularly updated.
– Overreliance on third-party keyword suggestion tools. Unpaid research tools can at times be unreliable as everyone uses them.
– Targeting highly competitive terms with no relevance. Whatever keywords your competitor may be using may not be applicable to you. Remember that!
– Using keywords that do not reflect how people actually search. This can totally mess up your SEO campaign as you’ll end up targeting other people not your customers.
– Not performing competitive keyword analysis. A competitive keyword analysis gives you an idea of how frequently searched a word is, which results in a lot of competition if it’s a regularly used phrase.
– Focus not on profitable terms – If you miss the terms used by your customers, they won’t end up at your website which means you won’t get the necessary traffic to convert visits into profit.
– Having no balance in keyword difficulty (highly competitive head term & long-tail keywords). There should always be a balance in your keywords. Highly competitive head terms are words such as ‘woman training shoes’ and long-tail keywords read something like ‘woman athletics shoes with comfortable sole’ for instance. There should be a balance between these types of keywords.
– Not knowing your Geography. If you’re not aware of you customer’s location then you’re in BIG trouble. As localization is about personalization. Google personalizes search and needless to say they take the stake!
– Missing search trends. SEO changes continuously, you have to keep up with the trends so you can keep up with your customer.
– Failing to keep track on how your keywords are performing overtime. This is ‘SEO suicide’ at its best. In order for you to improve certain aspects of your SEO, you need to know which areas you need to focus on.
– Not focusing on the buying behaviour of customers – Your customers will be at different buying stages.It’s important to have a breakdown of these stages and companies simplify the process by creating ‘personas’ (as witnessed in our earlier example).
Judging from all the skills and preparation learnt to build your house, you’re aiming for a mansion! Keyword Research too is the first step in achieving your SEO campaign.
As a business owner have to make sure that your customers are using keywords associated with your products and services otherwise they’ll end up moving to the next website which could be that of your highest competition. So always make sure that you update yourself with the latest SEO trends and keep track of how your traffic is converting into sales on your website.
I trust you’re not too exhausted after the ‘trial’ house building as you still need to decide where you’re going to build your home. Not to worry we have the perfect locations for you in Step Two which looks at Planning and Strategizing in building the perfect home!
