Clever Little Guy Contemplating SEO

Why traditional SEO might not be right for you!

A little advice as to whether other forms of SEO might be better for your website.

The big SEO…what does it mean? Many would say, optimising your page titles, meta descriptions, headings, page copy and other page elements using the keywords you want your website to be found for. But does that, very traditional approach, actually work for everyone?

We say…

Hell no!

Although optimising your website in this way helps to lay the foundations – especially when you are implementing other digital marketing techniques that use this as one of the indicators of quality – depending on your website, the industry you operate in, your competitors, etc, this form of SEO might not be the right way to go.

Why? Because other forms of SEO might:

  • Offer you better results
  • Drive more traffic to your website (let’s face it, that’s the point of SEO)
  • Be a more cost-effective way of gaining traffic
  • Help your website users stay, engage, and make contact – the ultimate goal!

What other options are there? We hear you cry

Well, they are all centre around content – we know, the hard bit, and the job that is forever on your to do list, but trust us, making it a priority, allocating resources and time to it, and generating real quality content will help with your SEO, we promise.

The two we tend to recommend, in no particular order, are…

FAQs

Unlike the copy on your landing pages, FAQs really do answer the common questions that your target audience have. A place where selling yourself isn’t needed, with the right research you can offer your website users more in-depth insights into the product or services you offer, and they’re also great for voice search.

Start by using a tool to find out what the FAQs are and create a list. Each FAQ should have it’s own page – no fancy one page solution where you click on a question and the text appears out of nowhere – which will allow you to include a page title, meta description, headings and other traditional page elements, which will be needed, along with the great, high quality answer you’re going to provide.

When writing the answers, think of them as if it was a Q&A interview with the experts. Include your brand’s personality and tone of voice, and don’t just answer the question with a short sentence. Think like your potential customer, offer them as much information as you possibly can. It is this information that will get them to contact you, after all, as well as giving search engines like Google the information they need to understand that your website is the place to go for expert knowledge.

Be the expert!

Blog posts

We fully appreciate that writing a blog post isn’t for everyone. Heck, we don’t always enjoy writing them ourselves, but it’s our job, and they really can help with your SEO and be a great source of information, when done right.

There are different approaches you can use, when it comes to what you should blog about, including, similarly to the above, answering your target audiences FAQs, what is trending/what’s in the news, events you have attended, and anything else that is related to what your target audience searches for and your products or services.

Again, it’s best to start with the research and create a list of what you want to write about. Unlike your FAQs, blog posts are a great place where you can, and we’d highly recommend you do, include imagery, videos and even podcasts or other audio. Of course, you still need words, and as with this blog you are reading, you should try and aim for more than 500 but, a big tip of ours, don’t just write for the sake of it, if it’s not flowing and it doesn’t make sense to increase the word count, then don’t – it’s best to focus on quality not quantity.

As with the FAQs, include your brand’s personality and tone of voice, and offer your target audience and reason to read it – true, indepth, insights – and include those ‘traditional’ page elements needed for SEO too.

An added benefit of your blog posts, they offer you new opportunities for social media content, so share them with your audience on there too – and not just once! Another top tip from us, share them multiple times, not too closely together, and especially later on down the line if something pops up in the news or is trending and that is relevant to the post you once wrote. You can also add additional content to your original blog post and share it as an update, or write an updated version and link to the previous one – winning.

Is that it?

Nope, it’s not. As with all the pages on your website, you should review the performance of the FAQs and blog posts, and adjust or tweak, where necessary, to make sure you get the best performance from them. Otherwise, if you leave them there to go off like vegan chocolate in the sun, they’ll be no good to anyone.

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