BULLET POINTS
What is My SEO Strategies
So, how to increase your site’s visibility and exposure through SEO?
Literally, it is all about your capability of doing SEO, like the technical SEO, the backlink building. However, this is not the major focus of this blog. We are talking about SEO strategies. In other words, my strategy could help you to utilize SEO to meet your business goal and make the whole process of doing SEO efficient and organized.
So let’s dive into it.
I would love to categorize website pages into three main categories:
- Functional Page: Product & Services pages.
- Informative Pages: Our mission page, About us page, Contact us page
- Content: Your blogs
* The first thing I have to mention is that I don’t have any experience dealing with super high DA websites before. If you have a super-powerful domain, you don’t need to have lengthy content on the web pages, while still able to rank some super competitive keywords. For example, juul.com a vaping website, their homepage even got ranked for “cigarette”. The biggest reason is that their home page got linked by tons of high DA websites with optimized anchor text. So, my SEO strategies are perfect for the majority of websites with decent DA like 30+ to 60+.
1. Functional pages:
You have to make sure your product or services page is able to rank all the transactions related brand keywords. Using apple.com as an example, the transaction-related brand keywords would be “buy apple laptop”, “buy apple air pod” etc. The important thing is that you’re gonna not only have ranked for those keywords but also have a correct page ranking for those keywords. Because people who search for those keywords have indicated to us that they are ready to make a purchase right away. We don’t wanna them to check about us page, or any other unrelated content.
2. Informative pages:
You have to make sure your informative page like about us page, FAQ pages, contact us page, etc got ranked when people are specifically searching for them. Using apple.com as an example again, their support page is in the position one when people use the keywords “Apple support ”. Same concepts as the functional pages, not only you need to rank these kinds of keywords at the position one but also have the right web pages for that.
3. Contents
Here is where the magic happens. Here is what most SEOs spend the most time on. Even though you don’t have a well-known brand or a powerful domain name. If you know how to do SEO, you will still have a chance to rank some competitive keywords.
Here are two situation people might have, click the link will lead to the corresponding section:
A. You just start writing content for your website or you have had content on your website but you have no idea about the search volume of the topics.
B. You have had some content on your website and you know did some sort of topic analysis.
A. If you have had good contents on your website. That is Good!
They have covered most of the hot topics in your industry. The most important work to do is finding the gaps and fill them. I used to use two methods or angles to find the content gap.
1. Utilize the customer’s journey to find the content gap
Source: https://www.digitug.com/
If you have had a lot of content that covers most of the hot topics. I would do a categorization for your content. Different content serves different groups of people who are at different levels of the customer’s journey.
Here is an example of Apple.com,
Content for awareness: “the best smartphone in 2020”, “”
Content for consideration: “New features of iPhone 12”, “different between 64G and 128G of iPhone 12”
Blog posts in most cases are serving people who are in the awareness and consideration level. When people are in the decision stage, your goals normally are:
A: Earn as much as possible revenue from them like “100 spend, 10 dollars cashback”
B: Check out as soon as possible like “Limited offer” and “Financial service”
After finishing the categorization, I will analyze those blogs to see if they really did a job during the customer journey.
A. For the awareness level of the targeting audiences
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- Check how many organic traffics they can bring monthly.
- Which blogs didn’t/did a good job
- What topics we are missing for targeting audience in the awareness stage
B. For consideration level of the targeting audiences
-
- Check how many organic traffics they can bring monthly.
- Which blogs didn’t/did a good job
- What topics we are missing for targeting audience in the awareness stage
- How many product / services page views generated from blogs (for blogs at consideration level of targeting audience, I would always insert product / service links throughout the content)
- How many check out page views generated from blogs
2. Through keywords analysis to find the targeting keywords you haven’t got a high rank.
Four steps:
1. Generate an as comprehensive as possible keywords list that you want to target
*I used to use “2 words method”
It means, only two words could have the same meaning as a long sentence. It fits most cases from my previous experiences. For example, for the keyword “the best smartphone in 2020”, I will group keywords which have “smartphones” and “2020” into one keywords group. Another example, for the keyword ”the new features of iPhone 12”, I will group keywords which have “feature” and “iPhone 12” into one keywords group. This trick could help to cover almost all of the keywords and generate a comprehensive keywords list.
2. Export an as comprehensive as possible keywords list your site has ranked from multiple third party keywords tools
3. Find out which keywords your site is missing or doesn’t have a decent rank on Google.
4. It is time to generate some contents for those keywords that you want to rank.
B. If you just start publishing contents on your website:
In this case, my suggestion would be finding some the most popular topics people are searching online in your industry. Doing so would be beneficial for both user experience and SEO, but in this stage, you won’t see a big improvement in the organic traffic.
Your Goals Won’t Always be Organic Traffics:
I would love to share two stories from one of my clients.
Story 1: They got some negative reviews from their previous customers. A couple of customers pointed out what the issue is. Instead of working on the hot topics, I decided to create 2 blogs specifically for this issue.The one is explaining what the issue is and what the possible causes for the issue. The two is about some easy solutions for the issue. In addition, we do keywords optimization for the keywords people probably would search on Google when they are suffering this issue.
Guess what? These two blogs generate a lot of page views. Some of them are directly from the search and some of them are from the home page since we have a blog section at the end of the home page. My goal for this case is not generating traffic for the website, instead reducing the churn rate and return rate.
Story 2: One client told me, one of their product lines is suffering an almost 50% return rate. Crazy, right. I know. After reading hundreds of reviews from multiple platforms.
I realize that people return their product because they literally don’t know how to install it properly. My client was starting to hire people to install the product for the customers while as you all know, the profit would be dramatically impacted. My solution is super straight forward. Two contents and two videos. In addition, we promote these two contents and videos on multiple related platforms. We also hire some open-boxers to do instruction videos on YouTube. My goal is, whenever people try to know how to install the product online, they can easily find the comprehensive instructions.
Even though, these two contents generated so many page views while I know most of them are our current customers. In other words, there are no benefits for the marketing but for the business.
The idea is that there is no fixed SEO strategy like a concept. It varies case by case. It really depends on what is your goal and how much SEO could help you to reach your goal.
Anyway, my goal is not plain ranks or organic traffics but your business!