There’s never really been a time when the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) moved slowly – or if there was, it was certainly longer ago than many of us would care to remember. However, it’s fair to say that the speed of change in SEO feels especially rapid at the moment.
With that in mind, you might struggle to know where to start tinkering with – or outright revamping – your brand’s SEO strategy to help you achieve improved return on investment (ROI) from it. That is, indeed, presuming you have much in the way of an SEO strategy at all.
Let’s keep things simple in a complicated world by focusing on some of the fundamental elements you should be looking at to help deliver an improved ROI from your brand’s SEO efforts.
Plan your content strategy around seasonal trends, peaks, and troughs
At a time like the present when SEO might seem quite different in 2023 from what it was three years ago, or even one or two years ago, it helps to pay attention to those things that don’t really change much over time.
A great example of such things that don’t change over time is the events and associations that people have with different times of the year. The products and services that your brand offers might be more relevant and appealing to many target customers’ needs during one season than they are in another season.
From New Year, to Valentine’s Day, to Easter, to the height of the summer holiday season, and then through to Halloween and Christmas… there’s so much that a brand like yours can plan an effective content strategy around, coinciding with those inevitable seasonal peaks and troughs for certain categories of product.
However, you will need to know how to pore over the historical search trend data that will show you all the key information about seasonality, and of course you will need to know something about the tactics that will help you exert the right influence on customers, through both slow and fast-paced periods of demand.
That is where working alongside a suitably qualified search engine optimisation agency could really help.
Optimise your content for informational searches, based on understanding audience intent
Not every potential customer who your organisation will wish to engage, will necessarily be someone who is ready to make a purchase immediately and that’s fine, as there are various touchpoints that a given shopper might navigate prior to converting (in other words, before they go as far as purchasing something from you).
A customer might first come into contact with your brand, for example, as a result of landing on one of your blog posts or landing pages, having performed what is known as a ‘long-tail search’.
Long-tail keywords are slightly longer than what many of us might have considered to be ‘keywords’ back in the day – think about three words to five words, and often being more specific than shorter, more generic keywords.
When a lot of people perform long-tail searches via Google, they’re specifically trying to seek out information about a topic of relevance to them, rather than necessarily seeking out a product or service they intend to buy immediately. After all, they might still be researching the various products or services that may represent the best match to their needs.
How can you begin to capture these potential customers making “informational” searches, even before they’re ready to buy?
Paying attention to the ‘People also ask’ entries that frequently appear on Google search results pages can certainly help give you insight into what searchers are thinking and querying about. You could then build much of your own website’s content around providing answers to these common queries.
Elevate the thoroughness and intensity of your competitor research
The chances are that you already know the identities of some of your organisation’s key competitors in your industry. Depending on what specific industry your organisation is active in, those competitors may or may not also be geographically close to your premises.
But there’s a lot of difference between having a vague awareness of your brand’s rivals and properly researching those rivals with your SEO strategy in mind.
For one thing, your industry competitors won’t necessarily be the same as your competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Yes, there will probably be some overlap, but your brand’s content might also effectively be competing for organic rankings with Wikipedia and news websites.
What can you do to go more in-depth with your competitor research for refining an SEO strategy? Well, you should scrutinise the type and format of the online content that is competing with yours. This will help you to consider the changes you could make to boost the value your content provides to the people you’re targeting your content at.
It might be the case, for example, that a high-performing competitor brand is producing a lot of how-to video content that seems to receive a lot of traffic, interest, and shares across social media. Maybe certain competitors attract strong search engine rankings through the publication of in-depth product reviews or ‘listicle’ articles?
Of course, we aren’t necessarily suggesting here that you should simply copy such rivals’ tactics, as you still need to give careful thought to what likely would, and would not, work for your brand. But certain tactics might emerge that you could adapt to help get better results from your organisation’s presence in the SERPs.
One more thing…
…there is naturally a lot more that you could do to help bolster your brand’s impact in the search engines among the right audiences than we have covered in this article. Nonetheless, we hope we have got you thinking about what some of the possibilities could be for optimising your business’s search strategy with ROI considerations at the forefront.
Why not get on the phone to PENNInk Productions today on 020 8144 7931 to find out more about how we could work with you as your chosen website design, branding, graphic design, and search engine optimisation agency?
Lisa Penn is a Visual Communications Specialist with a background in user experience and psychology. She has held a variety of roles encompassing user experience creative strategist, architect and manager, where she has successfully bridged the gap between design, technology and development.
