Contributors
@brandon-leuangpaseuth @paul-boag
Business Benefits
Increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from organic search.
Ask your sales, marketing, operations, and customer success teams to describe your ideal customers.
Note down their:
- Basic demographics
- Business or career
- Their pain points or goals
- Where they look for help
- Questions they have relating to your products or service.
- And the stage that they might be when it comes to being aware of their problem or your solution.
Open Google Search Console (GSC), click on Performance, scroll to queries to see what people type into search engines to find you, and write down the top 100 search phrases.
Create a spreadsheet with a list of search phrases that describe what you would search for if you were looking for your service.
- Ask your marketing, sales, and customer success teams to contribute to the spreadsheet.
- Include any search phrases which you got from GSC that are applicable to your business.
- Do a Google search for your service and add the autocomplete suggestions.
- Add suggestions from a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs or Google Ad’s Keyword Planner.
Use Google search results to see your keywords’ search intent and narrow down your spreadsheet list by removing keywords that aren’t related to your industry from the spreadsheet.
Yoast’s Guide to Search Intent describes search intent as: The term used to describe the purpose of an online search. It’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. After all, everyone who does an online search is hoping to find something. Is someone searching because they have a question and want an answer to that question? Are they looking to visit a specific website? Or, are they searching because they want to buy something?
For example, if your keyword phrase is cleaning services because you offer cleaning services, you may discover that the majority of people are looking for home cleaning, and you specialize in commercial cleaning.
Group your keywords into Bottom of the funnel and Top of the funnel keywords*.*
- Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) keywords is what people search when they are ready or almost ready to buy, which is at the consideration or conversion stage. For example, someone might search for <your product name> version comparison to figure out which tier or the version they need. Alternatives to your competitors are great keywords to target. Choose at least two BOFU keywords per service.
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU) keywords are what people use when they’re introduced to you. For example, online accounting software.
Write down content ideas for both BOFU and TOFU keywords and map them to your existing pages.
- Map BOFU keywords to your existing pages. When no existing content can be mapped, consider creating new pages around these keywords.
- TOFU keywords are best used for blog posts. Use tools like Semrush, Buzzsumo to discover topics ideas and create new blogposts around these keywords.
Write your service and landing page content and use the BOFU keywords to optimize those pages.
- Mention your keyword in the title tag, H1, URL, and within the first paragraph of your content.
- Use variations of your keyword, such as synonyms and related phrases, in the body of your content.
- Use an SEO content tool to find Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords for each of those pages and use the LSIs in the content.
Schedule your TOFU topics using a content calendar in a spreadsheet.
- When writing your TOFU content, use your customer research and discussions to develop a tone that your target audience will find approachable and attractive.
- Show expertise in your TOFU topics and answer questions. Google’s related searches and SEO tools like Surfer can help you find common questions around your keywords.
- Track the traffic coming into your posts and pages using a SEO tool, Google Analytics, or GSC.
Find 5-10 sites that publish roundup posts and guest posts, and look for pages with broken links.
- Use Google search to find websites that publish roundups and pitch some content you have posted on your website.
- Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to find broken links on other websites and send your published posts to replace the link.
- Reach out to bloggers and other non-competing websites to publish guest blog posts and add a link in them to your published posts.
Perform a technical SEO audit on your website using a tool such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog or Ubersuggest and resolve any issues discovered.
Follow suggestions from the tool to solve each problem.Run your website through Google Page Speed Insights and reach out to a web developer to optimize your website based on the issues highlighted by the tool.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:25:39Z