SEO stands for search engine optimization and is one of the greatest audience building tools you have at your disposal. Essentially, it’s the process of utilizing keywords, creating content, and building backlinks to boost your rankings on search engine results pages. By maximizing your SEO efforts, you can gain more organic traffic, earn a loyal customer base, and build your brand. Plus, if you dig into certain types of data for SEO, you can give your strategy a huge boost. In this article, we’ll cover different ways to analyze the data you have available to you and use it to improve your search engine rankings.
Just getting started with SEO or not sure where to begin? Check out our previous article on SEO tactics for small businesses. We cover how to conduct keyword research, on-page SEO techniques, how to create quality content, utilizing backlinks, competitive business research, and more.
Create content inspired by keyword research
To begin, you need to ensure that your content is inspired by keyword research in order to fulfill the need of SEO. Keywords are words and phrases that your potential customers are plugging into search engines. And, if your website offers quality content that addresses the keywords people are searching, it’s more likely to pop up on their search engine results pages.
There are a variety of different free and paid tools that can help you come up with keywords and phrases. Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, and Wordstream are all great options. Play around with a few different tools to find out which keyword research tools you like the best.
Another great way to find keywords is through question and answer research. Answer The Public, for instance, takes a word or phrase you’re interested in writing about and shows different questions people are asking, which might be relevant. Answering these is a great way to build up your content!
For example, if you sell clothing through your website, you might be looking to target keywords relating to jeans for a new denim campaign. If people are searching something like, “how to wear jeans at a party,” you could potentially create a piece of content based on that phrase.
Additionally, Google search results pages have a “People Also Ask” section that can help you generate keywords. Every time you search something, Google provides related questions that you can incorporate into your SEO efforts. Consider writing blogs based on these questions — Google can link back to your content to fulfill their answers.
If you need additional help with improving your content marketing, check out our blog post on increasing your content marketing return on investment. Content marketing ROI is still a gray area for a lot of businesses, but this guide can help. It covers a lot of different strategies to increase your return, including evergreen content creation, choosing the right topics, and how to be consistent.
Make sure your website offers a positive user experience
Ever visit a website on your mobile or desktop and find it slow, confusing, glitchy, or just plain difficult to use? No one wants that! So, if your goal is to attract people to your website and keep their attention long enough for them to become customers, you need to make sure your website provides them with a positive user experience.
Check your website data on a regular basis to make sure you’re getting it right. Web.dev has a great guide to monitoring your web vitals if you’re not sure where to begin. Page loading speed, bounce rates, average time spent on your website, and the frequency of abandoned carts are all great measures to help you determine if your site provides a positive user experience.
It’s likely your eCommerce website can be improved in a wide variety of ways, from its design to the images you use and the product descriptions you write. Pixpa has a fantastic guide to eCommerce marketing strategies, which gives you several steps you can follow to improve your site’s user experience, supercharge your marketing, and make more sales. Additionally, it has several tips on creating effective mobile navigation to improve your customer’s experience.
In today’s smartphone-guided world, making your website mobile-friendly is also a must. No one wants to zoom in just to navigate a desktop page on a small smartphone screen. Don’t let your mobile users sit on the backburner!
If you find that your website is having trouble in a few of these areas, start logging user activity to gather data. This can help you identify pain points, performance issues, security alerts, and more.
Look into where most of your customers are based
Where are your customers located? Do you have a high concentration in a few select areas, or are they more wide-spread? Knowing where your customers are based can help you understand their needs and market to them better. For instance, if you have a large concentration of customers in one area, you might want to put some of your focus on improving your local search engine rankings.
With a strong local SEO strategy, you can give your website the best possible chance of ranking for relevant searches that are conducted in or about a particular area, where a lot of your target clients might live. If you would like to learn more and find out how you can use this kind of strategy to your advantage, check out Loganix’s guide to local SEO for 2021.
Closely monitor your backlink profile
Securing links back to your website is a great way to boost your search engine rankings. This is because, when other high-authority websites link to your webpages, search engines will take this as a vote of confidence and give your rankings a boost. There are a variety of online tools that have been designed to help you monitor your backlink profile, like Link Explorer from Moz.
You can secure more links by creating valuable, high-quality, and engaging content that people want to link to, or you can write guest posts for relevant websites. Other strategies include carrying out original research or creating bright, informative infographics that people will want to share. If this is something you’ve never done before, Venngage has lots of free infographic templates you can use to get started.
By building relationships with other companies or bloggers, you can get your content shared as well. Take a look at our article on strategies for link building if you would like more advice.
Assess how your existing content is performing
If you’re trying to improve your SEO, you need to be constantly monitoring what’s working and what isn’t. Regularly take a look at your content and monitor its performance; check rankings, estimated reading time compared to the time spent on the page, whether your content is driving traffic, and if it’s leading to conversions on your website.
Fortunately, there are a ton of different ways to measure your marketing results. There’s no one way to measure business success, and assessing the performance of your content using data is no different. For more information, take a look at this guide to measuring and communicating your marketing results. They cover different key performance indicators (KPIs), the importance of tracking them, and how to do it effectively.
Use your social media insights to define your audience
While social media doesn’t have a direct impact on your SEO, it’s still extremely important for your business and marketing efforts. By taking a look at your intended audience and followers, you can get a better understanding of your customers.
Different platforms will give you a breakdown of your audience demographics, showing you things like age, gender, and location. You can also see which days and times your audience are online, which posts are the more successful, which grab their attention, and more. The better you understand your audience, the better you can implement new SEO strategies. You might market your products or services differently towards different age groups, post at different times of the day, or focus on entirely different types of content.
SocialPilot has a list of social media analytics tools that can help you get started in gathering data about your audience. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn all have built-in analytics on their websites that you can utilize. Otherwise, there are paid and free services from various companies that offer additional services and analysis.
ClicData can make it much easier for you to keep track of your social media analytics, as well! Check out their list of 6 dashboards for social media that you could be using to enhance your marketing strategies and better understand your audience.
Summary
Knowledge is power. You want to be putting your best foot forward when marketing your business, and monitoring and understanding the data that’s available to you is really going to help you with that. By digging into your data, you can better understand your customers, improve your brand voice, and give your search engine rankings a boost.
For further reading, take a look at our article on the key performance indicators that will help you to monitor your SEO performance. They cover how to assess your monthly traffic, website session durations, conversion rates, conversion value, and more.
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About the author
Adam Steele is the Founder and COO at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner for agencies and marketers. We build easy-to-use SEO services that help businesses scale. If you liked this article, please check out our SEO guides and templates on the blog.
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