SEO Strategy

Before you can start thinking about implementing techniques in order to help you improve your SEO, you must first consider what you’re hoping to achieve from your campaign. There are many different strategies you can follow, each with their own benefits, but not every one will be right for your business. What works well for one website may not be suitable for another, so deciding which direction you need to take is very important.

Brand Awareness

This is particularly important for new businesses, but all companies will follow this strategy to a degree, even the biggest ones. Just take a look at a single ad-break during one of your favourite TV shows, and you’ll see the equivalent of a brand awareness campaign. Some of the most well known companies (e.g. McDonalds, Coca-Cola) churn out advert after advert in order to keep their brand in the public’s mind. You wouldn’t think that they needed to, as they are so ingrained as a part of our society, but they do. The reason we all know these brands so well is because we encounter them on a regular basis. That’s brand awareness.

In order to increase your customer base and convince people that you are the company that should be perceived as synonymous with your industry keywords, you have to make them aware of your brand.

There are lots of SEO techniques that work towards this end goal:

• Onsite Optimisations – By optimising the website to target a wide range of relevant keywords, you can begin to build the reputation of your business within your desired industry.
• Citation Management – Citations (or backlinks) are a way of promoting your brand on other websites. Not only do they provide valuable links and traffic to your website, but they can help to spread your brand name across the Internet.
• Content Marketing – Content marketing is invaluable to brand management. By creating engaging content for your target audience and attaching your brand to it, you increase the chance of them considering your brand the next time they think about your industry.
• Social Media Marketing – Arguably one of the most cost-effective ways to raise brand awareness, social media marketing is a great way to reach out to potential customers, and also to display your brand. Users are more likely to trust a company that has an active social media presence.
• Email Marketing – Brand awareness shouldn’t just be used to reach out to new customers. You can target existing customers effectively through email marketing, tailoring your emails to ensure that your brand remains fresh in their mind.

Outreach & Engagement 

Whilst most SEO strategies concentrate on bringing users in to the website, this strategy concentrates on reaching out to your target audience in order to guide them towards a conversion.

We mentioned above that users put more trust in companies that have an active social media presence, but they also look to other users for feedback. It is believed that other people’s opinions of a product/service are the most important factor a potential customer takes into consideration before choosing your company. Have you ever bought anything online, been unsure, and checked the reviews of the product? Outreach and engagement is all about increasing the possibility of positive reviews of your business.

In a lot of ways, this is very similar to brand awareness, but with more focus on engaging directly with your potential customers. There’s even an overlap in the techniques that you can use to promote healthy engagement:

• Content Marketing – Creating engaging content and sharing it with your audience is a great way to promote conversation, as well as a great way of reaching out to previously untapped markets.
• Social Media Marketing – Social media will allow you to share your great content, talk to your customers easily, and build trust. The way you handle customer complaints and feedback will also show new customers what to expect.
• Email Marketing – If you’re not receiving enough feedback from your existing customers, a well-placed email might be all you need to get the ball rolling. Studies show that most customers (around 70%) would be more than willing to leave a review if asked to, but many rarely are.
• Blogger Outreach – This is a very industry-dependant technique. If you’re working in an industry that is covered regularly by full-time bloggers, approach them and ask them to cover your business in one of their posts. Their followers will respect their opinion, so are then more likely to visit your website.

Conversion Optimisation

Unfortunately, there are some websites that receive lots of visitors, but rarely receive conversions. If you fall under this category, then you definitely need to look at conversion optimisation as a strategy to implement.

There could be a number of reasons as to why your website isn’t converting. Whether it’s an out-dated design that wards of f potential clients, a poorly laid out website, or not enough incentive for users to convert, there are steps you can take to improve your conversion rate.

• Onsite Optimisations – There are many optimisations you can make to a website in order to improve conversions. As the title and description are the first thing your audience sees when discovering your website on search engines, they can be tailored to move the user further along the customer journey. Content can be edited to better cater to your customers. A comprehensive internal link structure can guide users through your website with ease. There are so many things you can optimise in order to improve conversions, which we’ll cover in more detail later on in this guide.
• Citation Management – You might have thousands of backlinks to your website, directing traffic to your main pages, but unless it’s quality traffic there’s little point. When seeking out backlinks, you need to consider whether your website will offer further insight into the subject of the external website. If you’re receiving high amounts of traffic from an external website, but no conversions, you may need to consider removing the backlink entirely.
• User Experience – A user’s experience on your website has a huge impact on whether or not they continue through to a conversion, so by reviewing and optimising the pages that aren’t as effective on your website, you can then help improve the conversion rate.