You did all the heavy lifting. Thought of content ideas and topics that your potential customers might be interested in reading. Then you proceeded to flesh them out into well-researched blogs and e-books. Afterward, you asked your designer to conjure up some beautiful images, inserted them into the posts and published the assets on your site.
But it’s been three months now, and the blogs are getting a negligible amount of traffic. Why isn’t your phone ringing off the hook? The newest email in your inbox is the “Test. Hello World!” one you sent to yourself. Why aren’t your readers engaging with your content?
It seems as if all the work you put in the last few months has been a waste.
If anything, you’re probably missing these 5 key SEO strategies:
1. Buyer Personas
How can you sell to your target consumer if you don’t understand who they are in the first place? For example, let’s say you’re trying to market a new type of running shoes. It’s relatively generic to say that you’re selling to both men and women.
Instead, you should get to the heart of your user. Start by outlining the following things:
- Demographic details: what’s their age, education, career?
- Personal preferences: what brands do they usually buy and what are their go-to places to consume content?
- Aspirations: where do they want to be in the next five years?
Developing actionable in-depth buyer personas will go a long way in ensuring the content you produce is optimized to appeal to their problems. How? We’ll explain below.
2. Keyword Research
The whole point of keyword research is to accurately target buyer pain points determined by the frequency of search parameters in Google.
This process begins from the buyer persona – once you’ve honed in on your target audience and understand their problems, concerns, and the things that keep them up at night, you’ll be in a far better position to create content that’s able to rake in traffic.
After all, is there any point writing content or trying to rank for terms with non-existent search volume?
With keyword research, you’ll get a lot of granular details about your target market’s search habits. One way to go about this is to use a third-party tool like Ahrefs.
Let’s return to the running shoes example we discussed in the previous section. Plugging the following search term into Ahrefs gives us the following result:
In Canada alone, this term has over 3,000 monthly searches alone.
In the box titled “keyword ideas,” you can see that people are also searching for things like ‘best running shoes,’ ‘best running shoes men,’ and ‘best running shoes 2018’.
Hence, if your content or website copy don’t have the same keywords, then you’re not going to be getting a slice of this traffic. Google’s crawlers will ignore you.
Yes, the buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your ideal customer. However, the questions and problems you outline on their behalf should be real and validated by keyword research tools such as Ahrefs.
3. Site Structure
Site structure is an important ranking signal for Google.
Site structure refers to the process of organizing your website’s content. That’s because as your business grows, you’ll probably keep adding new blogs, landing pages, product pages, and service pages.
However, neatly lay your content out — you don’t want to confuse your readers nor the search engine crawlers.
Improving site structure means using interlinking opportunities whenever you can, i.e., linking to other pages on your site to help users navigate through the breadth of the site.
Another way is to remove conflicting pages, i.e., those that are similar and therefore confusing for search engines to crawl.
4. Page Load Speeds
Google used page load speeds to rank websites since 2010.
In a blog post, the search engine leviathan explains:
“Faster sites create happy users […] when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed – that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”
According to Moz, a slow page speed means search engines can crawl fewer pages within their crawl time budget. This issue will hurt your rankings because the crawler will struggle accurately determining the full nature of your site. In turn, it’ll deprioritize it in favor of competing sites.
In a similar vein, page speed is also essential to the overall user experience. Longer load times mean people will exit (or bounce, in SEO parlance), leading to lower pages per visit and average time per site. This hurts conversion and will lower organic traffic and revenue.
5. Link Building
Straight off the bat, we should tell you that your B2B inbound marketing campaign is fruitless without a cohesive link building strategy.
Link building — i.e., the process of getting other websites to link (refer) back to you — tells Google (and other search engine crawlers) that the content on your site is educational and informational. Basically, people will benefit from it.
A high number of quality backlinks is universally agreed to be one of the most important ranking factors for SEO.
One way to go about this is to approach industry blogs and publications – if your content is indeed valuable and informative, then they will probably agree to link to it in their next blog or content asset.
Another is to identify broken backlinks on complementary sites and suggest that they fix it with a link to yours.
Conclusion
However, you must not treat it as a spray and pray approach. Instead, a top-notch content marketing strategy is an exact science, one involving many data sources and analytics. The strategies we’ve outlined in this post will help you get on the right track.