It is very common for marketers to trust that SEO is a technical process that takes in building links, progressing the speed of a website, and updating meta tags. The fact is that effective SEO is significantly more psychological in nature, demanding a true knowledge of the intent of the searcher and the capability of crafting a satisfactory response to the express and implied questions of the user. Bringing together the technical with the human-centred aspects of SEO is the real challenge a marketer is required to overcome.
This guide has been created by the experts at Dwarika Web Solutions to give you an idea about the five key elements of a successful SEO strategy in 2023. These elements are interdependent, and putting into practice a successful campaign necessitates that your team have a clear knowledge of each of them.
1. Creating Customer Personas for SEO
Deciding the right audience is one of the key things that play a crucial role in a successful SEO strategy. The most promising approach to do so is by creating customer personas. Personas are comprehensive synopsis of the target audience, their goals, pain points, and other characteristics that push them toward a final conversion.
Developing comprehensive customer personas helps writers recognize what points to draw attention to and curtail in the content. A B2B customer persona consists of performance metrics, superiors, responsibilities, and job titles. A B2C customer persona consists of pertinent demographic information, pain points, and shopping histories.
The more detail encompassed in a customer persona, the simpler it will be to bespoke the SEO strategy. An exact character profile provides a content strategist with insights into the type of keywords the customer may be searching for, resulting in the next topic, “search intent”.
2. Recognizing Search Intent
Search intent is referred to the reason a user searches a keyword, both implied and express. It occurs for a range of purposes, ranging from research-oriented keywords focused on developing the understanding of a reader of a specific topic to transaction-oriented keywords that imitate a desire to get an offering on the website.
From an SEO point of view, the personas play a crucial role. This is for the reason that the keywords you target will be influenced by them. Targeting keywords that align with the needs of the searcher makes sure that they are satisfied with their search results, presenting more prospects for conversions.
3. Putting the Hub & Spoke Model into Practice
The Hub & Spoke model of SEO is an efficient approach to organizing the keywords used in a campaign for simply linking. In addition, it is also used to create a direct path down the conversion funnel of a customer. It includes a single short hub keyword, which is also known as a container keyword. It expands into long-tail keywords known as spokes.
Hubs serve the purpose of both:
- Projecting the course of the campaign, which strategists can lean into or deviate from based on the outcomes
- Organizing written materials into one central page by which spoke articles are linked
It is significant to note when putting this model into practice in the strategy, spoke are required to always encompass the hub keyword. The following are the five key rules to follow when choosing spokes:
- The website is required to have a genuine possibility of ranking for each spoke keyword within 24 months of publishing a page
- The website must not already rank for those keywords
- The search intent of each spoke is required to be transactional
- Each spoke keyword is required to autocomplete within a ten-item dropdown list in the Google search box
- Each spoke keyword is required to encompass every word in the keyword phrase of its hub
After deciding spoke keywords by following the above rules, the next step of SEO strategy is assigning each keyword and appropriate page type.
4. Allocating Appropriate Types for SEO Keywords
Page type is referred to the structure, contents, and layout of a web page. Based on the search intent a page exists for, certain page types may fit the objective better than others.
B2B companies are more probable to make use of landing pages that fall on the solve to commit region of the spectrum. This is for the reason that their audience encompasses professionals looking for solutions to niche issues. By contrast, B2C companies will mainly put out a more stratified blend of very much transactional product pages that are supported by research-oriented blogs or articles.
Blogs or articles are an exception to the spectrum. This is for the reason that they can target almost every search intent. For instance, a blog can encompass information that responds to the search query at the same time as presenting a call to action. In the same manner, B2C customers may find their way toward transactional page types such as a product page.
5. Coming Up with the Best Content for SEO
The best page on the internet for a specific keyword is the one that best fulfills the search intent of the target audience. You fulfill search intent by deciding the right page to get the searcher but even by writing in a fashion that responds to both the queries they have expressively asked and the ones they did not realize they had.
Apart from the creative skill needed to put the above into practice, the following are the three core elements of outstanding SEO content:
- Direct Tone
Once search intent has been recognized, blogs are supposed to lay emphasis on right away offering the audience their desired information. The answer of the searcher is supposed to ideally be included in the introduction in a summarised manner, allowing the remainder of the piece to flesh the topic out further in the rest of the blog.
Offering value early on quickly recognizes trust with the audience, making them more probable to:
- Get back to the website later
- Subscribe to the email list
- Fill out a contact form
- Make a purchase
The remainder of the content is supposed to present valuable information, keeping away from figure-of-speech phrases, anecdotes, or other conversational techniques that detract from rapidly to the point. The sole exemption is when a customer persona mandates a conversational tone.
- Skimmable Elements
Skimmability is referred not just to how effortlessly readers can go through the blog, but more importantly how swiftly they can find important or pertinent information. Writers can improve skimmability by means of the following approaches:
- Make use of numbered or bulleted lists to break up the page where applicable
- Separate the subject manner with several headers to quickly direct the attention of the reader
- Lessen the length of the paragraph to four to six sentences, maximum
A lot of readers are not willing to go through the whole page. Therefore, each portion of the blog is supposed to be written to stand alone, providing the readers with the answers they need to gain a quick understanding of the content.
A wonderful approach to test the skimmability of a piece is to make use of the “scroll test”. Begin at the top of the webpage and gradually but progressively scroll down. Take note of where your eyes are drawn and where they glaze over. Once you have discovered the latter, begin looking at ways to improve that portion by breaking up text or introducing images, tables, or lists.
- Visual Aids
Visual elements such as images, graphs, and tables make information more digestible by breaking up long tests. In addition, it helps to keep the eyes of the reader moving. Visual elements are supposed to be used with an intended purpose, as mentioned below:
- Image – Visual representations utilized to summarize or exemplify the key takeaways of the surrounding text.
- Graph – Perfect for quantitative findings covering one or multiple topics in greater detail.
- Table – Best utilized when blogs are covering a broad topic that covers a lot of facets of
categories.
Visual elements should just be included if they offer value for the audience. It might be alluring to encompass a pertinent image next to a header to break up the page, but pictures are supposed to serve as a manner to exemplify the content further. A stock image used just for its formatting value will signal to the reader that the content offers little value.
Putting an SEO Strategy into Practice
Blending the human-focused aspects of SEO such as search intent with the technical aspects is an intricate task. Marketers are also required to be familiar with the ways to measure SEO results, tracking KPIs such as conversions, organic traffic, and SERPs in order to verify if their strategy is successful. Taken together, building an in-house team that is able to implement every aspect of SEO is a challenge for a lot of businesses.
For that reason, a lot of businesses outsource their SEO efforts to an experienced partner. Dwarika Web Solutions is a full-service SEO company in Toronto that specializes in creating SEO strategies to target intricate B2B markets. In addition, we deal with every step of the process from the selection of the keywords, to creating content, to analytics and reporting.
Dwarika Web Solutions is a leading SEO company in Toronto that can help you outshine your competition in 2023 by performing the best content marketing. Feel free to contact us at +1 (855) 561-4557 to speak with a professional!