Getting your website at or near the top of the page on search engines is critical to online success, whether you are trying to attract visitors or focusing on conversions.  Either way, understanding your customer and providing optimized quality content is essential.

Understanding Your Customer

Knowing what your customers need and then delivering on it gets to the core of every successful business.  Whether you sell to individual consumers or you are a B2B seller, you need a firm grasp of who they are, what they buy, and why they buy it.  The more you know, the more you can tailor marketing, product or service offerings, and pricing to be competitive.

Establishing Trust

Trust may be the most powerful currency you have.  If someone doesn’t trust you or your product, it doesn’t matter how good it is or how much of a bargain it is.

When you go to your favorite grocery store, you trust that the aisles will be clean and well-stocked.  The fruits and vegetables will be fresh. The price will be competitive. When that trust is rewarded, you’re likely to go back again.  Imagine, however, if you go and the floors are dirty, they don’t have what you want, and the fruit looks bruised. You’ll likely lose that trust.  Getting them back to your store will be difficult if not impossible.

The same thing can happen with your website or with search results.  If people are searching for your product or service and they can’t find you, they may never know you are there.  If they do find you and come to your website and the quality is poor, they may never return. Everything you do online has to be professional.  It is, after all, a reflection of your business.

Providing Quality Content

An effective way to build trust is by providing quality content that provides real value. By positioning you and your company as experts in the field, it can create a feeling of trustworthiness that no advertising can do.  Providing content that solves a problem, answers a question, or explain how to do things gets noticed by search engines and visitors.

Researching Keywords

Keyword research can help determine the most common words people use to search in your niche.  Since search engines want to deliver the most relevant results possible, these keywords are a signal that your content matches what the searcher is looking for.  It’s called “semantic search.” That’s the tech that tries to determine what people really mean when they type in a keyword. The semantic search looks at how keywords relate to each other.  For example, if someone types in “couch,” it’s only by looking at the relation to what else is typed that search engines know whether someone wants to buy one, sell one, refurbish one, or looking for a cover.  By understanding the combination of keywords used, you can target your content.

You want to find the keywords that drive the most search results in your niche and then create content around those terms.  When your content keywords have a direct match, or high relevance, to the semantic keyword, search engines will reward you with a higher quality score.

Finding The Right Keywords

A simple way to see this in action is to type in a keyword phrase and then scroll to the bottom of Google and look under “Related Searches” to see what other keywords people use when searching.

Google Ads has a free keyword planning tool you can use to get ideas.  While designed for placing ads, it can give you some ideas of the right keywords.  Of course, your best strategy is to work with professionals that do keyword research and craft quality content to optimize your results.

The Importance of Keywords And Quality

53% of the top 20 search results have keywords in their title.  They also have something else in common: quality and depth. The content that performs the best typically has at least 1,000 words and provides greater detail.  So-called “thin content” loaded with keywords but providing relatively little value does not perform as well.

Andrey Lipattsev, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist, recently acknowledged that quality content is one of the single most important Google ranking factors.

Link Currency

In addition to keywords, link building is one of the most important things you can do.  The more links you get from other high authority sites, the more search engines assume your content has value.

Delivering the value and creating great content is more likely to attract social shares and organic links.

What Signals Do Search Engines Use To Rank Content and Websites

Obviously, the higher you rank on search engines, the more likely people are to find you and visit your website.  No one approach by itself is going to push you up the page. It takes a concerted effort across several key factors.

Google uses hundreds of algorithms to rate sites with the goal of displaying the most relevant results for users.  To determine its search quality ratings, it indexes the main content of each page on a website and assigns a quality score:

• Expertise and trustworthiness of content
• Quality, volume, and freshness of content
• Keywords and search terms in content
• Transparency about site’s purpose
• Website reputation

Google engineers have repeatedly said you have to get the basics down and provide relevant, high-quality content consistently. In other words, without high-quality and fresh content, optimized for search, you can’t expect to score well organically.

When you work with us, we do a YourVoice discovery process and extensive keyword research in order to help you discover what content will be best for your website to optimize SEO and help you rank higher.