It's confusing. Your Web site ranks on page one of several Google searches, you've placed a Google ad, and yet your company isn't seeing any extra revenue.
First, it's no small feat to get listed on page one of a google search. Nice work.
Second, you need to be familiar with the phases of the search satisfaction process. And if your prominent search position isn't doing it for you, you need to know where the disconnect is happening.
There are four phases of the search satisfaction process:
- Search
- Attraction
- Engagement
- Fulfillment
In Search, users enter a keyphrase and is presented with results. That's all that happens.
The user then moves into the Selection phase by choosing the result that they think will best suit their needs. If none of the results look appealing, they loop back through the Search phase, changing the keyphrase in the hope of improving the results.
Once the user selects a result and is taken to the Web site, they go into the Engagement phase. If the Web site isn't interesting, the user will loop back through Selection and choose a different Web site to go to. If none of the Web sites are engaging, the user eventually goes back to Search and enters a new keyphrase.
In the Fulfillment phase, the user clicks on one of the calls to action on your site and makes a purchase, shares a blog post, registers for a service or...whatever it is you want them to do.
In this guide I'm going to take you through the steps of search satisfaction, and show you how to improve your chances of taking your customer to the next step.
Step 1.
Search. The...final...frontier...
These are the voyages...of the Website...Insert Name Here...its continuing mission, to explore strange new keywords, to seek out new sites and new blog comment sections...to boldly go...where no bot has gone before.
As any thirty-five year old man living in his parents' basement will tell you, these aren't the words that form the introduction to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Of course, that guy's also going to insist that Donnie Darko is the deepest most meaningful movie in history, and if you disagree, you just didn't understand it. Seriously, you're going to want to punch that guy.
However, it's likely that that guy can tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about Search Engine Optimization. You would probably only understand every fifth word, though.
As important as SEO is, not all search results are created equal. Search engines show results in two sections:
- paid search results, and
- organic search results.
In this guide I'm going to talk specifically about organic search results, because any idiot with a credit card can get ranked #1 on Google's paid search. But that's an expensive way to do business.
Organic search, and much of this guide, comes down to one word: content.
They say "Content is King," but it's not true. Search and Social (the ability to have your Web site found and shared) are the twin rulers of the Internet -- but content is the power behind the throne.
Copywriting for SEO
When you write for the Web you’re trying to serve two masters, and it can be tricky sometimes. First and foremost, you’re writing for humans, so your work must be readable. I’m sure you’ve received spam emails that someone had removed every pronoun and preposition and just sent you whatever was left. That’s bad SEO copy. If your text isn’t readable, no matter how much a computer loves it, no human will ever read it.
Second is that you must also write for computers . When you know what kinds of keywords your site visitors are looking for, you can incorporate those, and other related phrases, into your writing.
So how do you strike the right balance?
Laura Lippay, partner at Nine by Blue (and former Technical Marketing Director for Yahoo!), says "If I had to weigh usability against SEO, I'd always choose usability. I think about whether what I'm writing is beneficial for my readers, because if it is, they'll share it and they'll link to it."
But that's not to say that you should ignore keywords in your copy -- search engines use these words to figure out what your page is about, and to categorize and index it. But to include keywords, you need to know which ones. And chances are, your copy already includes some of the most useful ones.
To illustrate how build keyword optimization into your content, let's say you own a business that repairs flat screen televisions. Take a few minutes to think of all the things your customers might put in their search engine when they try to find a tv repair company. Getting ranked on the first two or three pages of search results is important to give your Web site the best opportunity to be viewed by searchers. But getting ranked for keywords that are related to your business is more important. If you repair televisions, it's not helpful to you to be ranked on page one of Google's results for "screen door repair." You'll ideally want to be well-ranked for words like:
television repair...and so on.
tv repair
lcd tv repair
lcd television repair
flat screen tv repair
fix my tv
fix my flat screen
fix my lcd
broken tv
tv not working
free estimate
Now, you can either use all of these phrases, or you can go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and start plugging in search terms.
The term "television repair" yields 551 results.
You can sort the results by monthly global searches, monthly local searches, or keyword competition. Keyword competition is a good reflection of how much you might need to pay per click in a paid search.
Since you probably don't take tv repair jobs from other countries you'll want to sort by local searches.
"LCD tv" was searched 1,220,000 times in the last month, while "samsung tv" was searched 673,000 times. Other manufacturers also appear in the list, so perhaps it would be a good idea to make sure you identify the manufacturers whose products you repair in your text. Either way, using the most-searched-for terms is the best place to start.
So maybe your site copy might read:
Do you have a flat screen tv that doesn't work anymore?
Don't think about throwing your broken tv away before you bring it to ABCTV Repair. We'll take a look at your lcd television and give you a free estimate of how much it will cost to fix your Toshiba, Sony, Philips, or Samsung flat screen.
Hopefully, to most readers, this short description reads very naturally, and would encourage them to have their tv checked out. To search engines, however, it's a wonderful list of keywords and phrases (highlighted) that will direct Internet users straight to your Web site.
Regularly adding new content to your site, and optimizing site copy aren't the only things that can help you climb the search engine rankings; what goes on in your site's code is important, too. Alt Text and Meta Tags for page elements like images are important to help search engines categorize and index those elements. Page titles and section headers should have meaningful titles that include keywords, too. But if you have the chops to create the code for these things, you probably already understand SEO for coding.
These are the parts of SEO that you have some control over, and from which you'll see quick(er) results from your efforts. However, there are longer-term actions you can take that slowly improve your site's ranking in ways that are more effective over time (such as generating inbound links to your site.)
Methods for generating inbound links on other Web sites, but the method can be summed up in a sentence: comment on other sites where you can leave links to your own site. When search engines look at those sites, they'll see links to yours, and that's important in helping search engines figure out how trusted your work is.
And let's not forget the reason for all this work: getting people to your Web site so that they'll buy something or share something.
Next: Selection. Why do searchers choose your, or anyone else's, site to look at?
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