EP 3: Quality SEO Starts With Questions

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

If you joined me in the last few weeks, you’ve heard me talk about the core concepts of SEO. I’ve tried to stress the importance of a holistic approach to SEO and the quality SEO requires you to act as a servant for your target demographic. I’ve also preached the importance of maintaining a solid and very structured SEO process.

In last week’s episode, I stated the first step in my SEO process is to ask lots of questions. Today, I’d like to talk about the right questions you need to ask answer to kick your SEO strategy into high gear.

I’ll be covering a lot in a short amount of time so I’ll have a list of these questions available on the SEObits.fm website under the show notes.

When I kick off any type of SEO project, I’d like to start with questions that pertain to you, who you are, and what you do. I call this set of questions introspection.

My questions include:

How would you describe your website, business, or blog to a potential client or person you know?

How would you describe your product or service offering?

What sets you apart from your competition?

While you may think that these questions are easy to answer, they’re really not. It’s very hard to talk about yourself. I can instantly think of great things to say about my clients or people I know and yet, I struggle to do it for myself. I blame this on my grandma because she always told me not to be egocentric. And so, I grew up thinking that and I really struggled with it today.

But the issue is you have to be egocentric. You need to truly understand who you are and what you do so that you can help search engines understand this too.

My next set of questions pertains to your target market. Not only do you need to have a solid grasp of who you are, you also need to understand who you serve.

In website design, we use personas to help in messaging and navigation. My starting questions for target market pertain to these personas. And they are:

How would you describe your ideal customer or client or website visitor?

Is it possible to group your target audience into specific segments?

When you group your website visitors into buckets, you can better speak to them and you can help them find the most appropriate content for their needs and desires and wants. SEO plays a large role on this because different people will have different needs which means they’re going to search differently as well.

My next set of questions lead to the product and service offering. These questions may seem basic but they’re important to the overall process. Here they are:

What are the names of your products and services?

How might one describe each product and service?

Now, let’s make a list of each product or service and describe in single words or short phrases anything that you can think of that would help illustrate what they are, what they do, and things like that. The reason I use these questions is people tend to get caught up in their cute product or service names or worse yet, industry jargon. They fail to remember their target market doesn’t necessarily search for these cute product and service names. Instead, they’re looking for actual solutions to their problems.

By forcing clients to think through their offering in the eyes of their clients or potential website visitors, we start to really get to the real search terms. When we get to the real search terms, this helps position us better for SEO traffic and website conversions.

Now, let’s dig deeper into website personas. Again, these are designed to help you better attract service and convert your website visitors. My questions are:

How might you describe each persona? Think about that and try to get really down deep into the persona and who they are.

The next question is, what goals or objectives do each persona have?

What type of frustrations, pain points, or concerns might each persona have?

Do the different personas have the same buying criteria or do they vary by persona?

And similar to that, do different personas process through the same buying cycle in decision tree or does that vary by persona as well?

Do the website personas have the same marketing channels or do they arrive to the website from different locations?

Those locations could be email or social media like LinkedIn versus Facebook. It could be referrals from different websites or blogs. There are a lot of varying ways they can arrive and it’s important to understand the different marketing channels for each individual persona because they very might be very different and that will influence your marketing strategy and tactics.

OK. The final questions for personas are:

What products and services would apply to each individual persona and what words or phrases might each persona use to describe your products and services?

Now, this will require you to put yourself into the mind of your persona but it’s very important.

Notice we are starting with the target market’s goals. Then we move on to their issues or problems and then we land on their method of discovery for finding solutions to their problems. It’s that progression that’s really important.

When reviewing your target market’s entire buying cycle, we start to discover potential keywords that will help us target website’s visitors throughout the entire stage or stages of their search and their buying criteria. And that’s really, really important. Most companies will only focus on the search right before they action is taken like a sale or a lead or something like that. That’s a huge mistake.

You have to consider and target traffic at all stages of the search cycle to be truly successful. You’re probably thinking of a ton of questions, and you’re right. And I’m not even done yet. I have a few more.

But before I continue, I want you to remember that what you are doing now is you’re going well beyond what anyone does with SEO. You’re creating a very solid start to your strategy and your tactics by beginning with questions and answers. These questions and answers are building a foundation for you to build upon and they really do create a very solid SEO strategy.

All right. Next, let’s move on to your competitors. It’s important to know your traditional and your online competitors so you can data mine them and learn from them. When you have a deep understanding of your competitors, you can beat them in search.

My competitor questions are three, different sets, and they’re pretty basic. OK. So who do you consider to be your top traditional competitors?

These would be people that you compete with on an everyday basis.

Next is who do you consider to be your top online competitors?

Online and traditional competitors definitely differ in a lot of cases so it’s important to understand the difference.

And then finally, who do you consider to be authoritative websites within your industry? And very similar to what you do but not direct competitors. These are also important questions because they can provide some very distinct knowledge for you to learn from, tactics and strategies that you can glean from and put them into your own marketing tactics.

OK. So, we’re breaking down traditional and online competitors. We do this because they are again, different many times. And you compete against both, right? You’ve got your real-world people that you may compete on RFP or a sale or a lead or whatever that your business does.

And then you’ve got the online competitors which can be completely different. Those are the people that compete head to head with you on search terms and traffic. And again, many times these are different. Now, you’re probably asking yourself, “Well, how do you find out your online competitors? Where can you discover them?”

You can use tools like SEMrush, Spyfu, KWFinder, all of those tools can help you locate them. I’m an avid user of all three packages and I list these in the show notes because I think they’re wonderful software solutions and they’re going to help you discover all kinds of goodness and competitor data.

OK. Next, let’s move on to your existing content. We have to review your current state so we can better plan for you future state. My questions for content are, what content would you consider to be the most important content in your website?

Next, what content would you consider to be the most active on your website?

And then finally, what content currently brings in the most traffic?

So your content, you have what you consider to be important content then you have a content that’s active so when people are already on the site, what are they looking at. Then you have landing pages and destination pages where people come into the site directly from them.

And contrary to what people think a lot of items, it’s not the homepage. If you’re doing SEO right, they come in from various places over the website and the homepage is a small portion of that traffic.

So again, you’re probably asking yourself, “Well, I don’t know how to answer any of that.” You can get the answers to these questions if you’ve got some data in like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Spyfu, all really good sources of data. And again, I’ll list these in the show notes.

So I like to review content with clients because they many times are surprised what we find. What they think that their top content is, generally isn’t the most active on their site or doesn’t in bring in traffic. And it’s really important to understand that so we can really plan our future state appropriately.

I know my top content because I look at it daily. But most clients are busy running their businesses and they don’t have time to dig into the data. But when did dig in to this data for an SEO project and we need to make sure that we have a really strong understanding of your current state so we can plan the future state and make sure that it is the right traffic through the right channels with the right content.

OK. My final question relates to your existing keywords. There’s only one question here but it’s an important one. So what do you consider to be the top keywords or phrases for your website? In other words, what phrases would you like to show up for an organic search?

I ask this question for two main reasons. The first one is most of the time, the phrases people think they are targeting don’t deliver any traffic because they’re not ranking for them in search. And then the second reason I ask is when I ask you for your most important phrases and then I want you to compare that answer to all of the other answers you gave me above like describing yourself or your products or your services and what would your potential clients search for, and a lot of times, the phrases that you gave me at the end of these process and the information that you gave me at the beginning and throughout, they don’t match up. And they need to match up.

You need to make sure that the phrases that you’re targeting and the phrases that you think are your must-have phrases and you want to rank for in search are the ones that pertain to you, who you are, what you do, and what your target demographic needs assistance with. That’s how you bring all of it together and that’s how you start to establish a really good foundation for SEO and your strategy to come.

OK. I know I threw a whole lot at you today and I hope I had you thinking about who you are, what you do, and who you serve. You can find all of the questions I talked about and the links to the software solutions that I mentioned in our show notes at SEObits.fm.

In the future episodes, we’ll be working through what you do with all of this data and how you’re going to apply it to your SEO and your marketing efforts.

Thanks for joining me this week and I look forward to chatting with you next week.