How do real people search for information on the Internet? That’s the key question to ask yourself when optimising your website to gain the largest amount of traffic to your pages. Yes, search engine spiders are important, but when it comes down to the bottom line, real sales (and real sales dollars) come from real people.
So, how do searchers seek information? Let’s review some of the top ways people are apt to find your website.
1. Location, Location, Location
Depending on the type of product or service someone is seeking, he or she is most likely to look for it in the most convenient location. So, if someone wants to find a deal on target shooting in Brisbane, for instance, they are likely to enter a search term similar to “Brisbane discount shooting range”. If you specialise in providing a product or service to a particular geographic area, you will want to be sure your web pages are optimised to reflect your location and use your city name in meta tags, keywords, and written content.
2. Imperfect Descriptions
One thing you can be assured of is that your target audience won’t always use perfect terms to describe your product or service. People are human and they make mistakes. They don’t always spell really well. Oftentimes they don’t know the proper term for a particular thing. Keep this in mind when optimising your website. You will want to include alternate spellings of keywords (such as nightclub/night club) in content strategies (without making your site look unprofessional)If a product you sell is better known by a manufacturer name (such as “Hoover” instead of “vacuum” or “Band-Aid” instead of “bandage”), include that in your list of keywords on the site, as well.
3. Sentences and Questions
Another common way that people search for information online is by typing in a sentence or question. For instance, if someone wishes to find a product that will take the smell of pet urine out of their carpet, they might enter this search phrase: “What will take the smell of dog urine out of carpet?” That specific phrase would be an excellent title for a blog post or article for a cleaning product or service, which would become part of the URL if you have the permalink structure set up to include it (and you most certainly should change the permalink from its default structure for best SEO).
4. Social Searches
Another way that many people find the information they are seeking online is via social searching; in other words they search through social media sites and content like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. either in posts or comment threads. That’s why it is extremely important for a website owner to make social media part of the overall marketing plan – and include links to your social accounts on your website.
If you remember that your sales – and profits – are the result of real human beings coming to visit your website, you will naturally focus on the organic SEO tactics necessary to make your online successful.
Need help with SEO tactics? Market Ease is an Adelaide SEO provider who knows what makes websites succeed!