If you’re a business owner or a marketing professional, you’re most likely already looking into SEO to grow your business. However, one major crux is just how much information, advice, and super “simple tricks” are out there regarding SEO that ultimately lead nowhere.
We all know how frustrating it can be to spend so much time reading books, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, and looking up articles and blog posts only for your website to remain stagnant on the coveted Google search results page. Fortunately, despite how many times it updates its algorithm, ever since its inception, Google has only cared about two factors when it comes to SEO. Here’s how you can finally grow your business with a simple two-step SEO strategy.
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1. Keyword Research is Your Closest Friend
You’ve probably heard about the term keyword research for SEO a million times already, but that’s only because it’s true that keyword research is the number one element you need in your successful SEO strategy. The fact of the matter is that there’s no point in getting your website, pages, or posts to rank high if they’re about something nobody wants. It’s the first cardinal SEO sin. Let’s say you’re the best, greatest, number one dominant website or page about… parrot beak polish. While there must be some (very interesting) parrot beak polish aficionados out there, how many people are actually searching for that?
The big paradox of SEO is that it’s very easy to rank for keywords no one is searching for, but that’s only because there is no competition, which means you need to do actual SEO research. How do you do that, though? The simple (and boring) answer is to get a paid tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. They’re both fantastic tools that will tell you exactly the kind of keywords and data you need. If you’re not willing to go for a paid subscription, you can also try out Ubersuggest, or Google’s Keywords Planner, but it’s advisable to take those results with a pinch of salt because ultimately, you get what you paid for (and you paid nothing).
Ideally, you want to search for keywords that a lot of people are searching for, and those keywords have to be 100% relevant to the website you or your company are working on. For example, if you’re working on a fitness equipment website, you want to look for keywords such as “treadmills”, “dumbbells”, “home gym”, and “indoor fitness”, but you probably don’t want to look for irrelevant keywords like “immersion blender” or “convection oven”.
Another paradox of SEO is that you want to target keywords that a lot of people are searching for, but ones that don’t have a lot of competition fighting for them. It sounds like an impossible task, but it’s doable. For instance, if you’re going into the celebrity or pop culture niche, you’re very likely going to struggle with websites like People or TMZ if you’re targeting the same keywords they are – for example, “Taylor Swift dress” – so you want to get a little bit creative with the topics and keywords you choose.
In your quest for SEO, you will most likely find that the primary keywords, the real big hitters, are the ones all your competitors are fighting each other for. So, the trick is to find a keyword that a decent number of people are searching for, but not a lot of people are competing for. That way, you can sneak in with your website and make more money. For example, a keyword like “men’s watch” is going to be very difficult to compete for, but something like “luxury watch for men” will probably be easier to sneak in and get a piece of the cake.
How Do I Know How Difficult a Keyword Is to Rank?
With keyword research, guessing how easy or hard a keyword is to rank isn’t very realistic. Fortunately, there are tools like Semrush and Ahrefs that make it much easier, especially Semrush’s keyword difficulty score option which rates the difficulty of keywords on a scale of 0-100. If your keyword falls between the 0-30 range, it’s green and you’re ready to rank high with it, but if it’s closer to the red 100 score, it’s going to be much, much harder to rank with it. A 100 difficulty score would apply to something like “Space exploration” if you’re trying to compete with NASA of all people. But there’s a catch here, too. If a keyword is too easy, say on the 1-2 score scale, it’s worth taking a step back and asking yourself why there are no competitors or commercial value for it.
How Could I Do Keyword Research for Free?
Other than the free tools like Ubersuggest and Keyword Planner, there are two very powerful free real-world tools that can help you with your keyword research: your brain and your colleagues! If you’ve been in a business for some time, sometimes it can be beneficial to close your eyes for a moment and in a zen-like fashion ask yourself “What are the questions people ask me?” because if you know what the questions people ask you are, you’ll know what they ask Google, and you’ll know what answers they’ll be looking for. This is where salespeople become incredibly useful in SEO. They pick up phones, talk to customers, and know exactly what genuine questions people are asking.
So, try to speak to the sales department in your company; they know what customers want to know just before they make a purchase and it’s a good idea to pick their brains. In this case, forget theoretical or experimental SEO because this is real-world data that can be more valuable than any digital tool that ultimately makes a guess based on virtual information.
Marcus Sheridan’s book “They Ask, You Answer” dives deep into this idea and it’s definitely worth checking out if you want more advice. This is why keyword research is so important – it encompasses the very core marketing 101 principles of finding out what people want and convincing them that you’re the right person to give it to them. It’s a tale as old as time and marketing books dating back all the way to 1911 would tell you the exact same thing.
2. Content Creation Builds Trust with Your Customers
Once you find out exactly what people want and you already know you’re ready to provide them with it, now is the time to build trust and present your website as authoritative and knowledgeable. The best way to do that is by writing articles and content from the heart. It’s easy to churn out AI-written content one after another, but if it feels lifeless and robotic, it’s much harder to get potential customers to trust you. If someone is searching for the best way to lose weight, unless they know you’re a trustworthy site well-versed in fitness, they’ll be less inclined to take your advice. The only way to write from the heart is by either writing it yourself or by hiring very good writers.
How Do I Learn to Write Trustworthy Content By Myself?
Learning to write your own content is a very valuable tool to have in your SEO arsenal, and thankfully, it’s easier than ever. The best way to do this is by what’s known as the puke-on-the-page effect; you just let all the information you have out and figure out how to make it pretty afterwards. For that, you can use Grammarly or ChatGPT to clean up what you just wrote. If you don’t know what to write, ask! This is where the salespeople come in again because if you just ask them about the sort of answers they give clients, they will LOVE to tell you all about them.
There are so many easy ways to come up with content that it’s practically impossible not to have something in mind. Research, talk to experts, make notes, use your company’s sales videos… you can even transcribe those videos and use ChatGPT to turn them into articles. Whatever you do, though, has to be from the heart; it has to be human first and foremost. This is because, at the end of the day, humans are the most trustworthy and authoritative source on the planet.
Building trust is important because even if your content isn’t the best, it can be the most trustworthy to check out, but if people don’t trust you, they won’t pay much attention to your website and Google is going to recognise this and retaliate by burying you in the rankings. For example, if we’re still on the fitness niche and your content is full of false information like magic pills for weight loss or ultra-quick solutions like drinking blended hay, people will be far less likely to head to your website for more advice and your pages may end up in the marketing graveyard: Page 2 of Google search results.
How Do I Build Trust with My Customers?
There are several ways of building trust with potential customers. The simplest one is to put testimonials on your website. Grab a plugin that pulls your reviews over from Trustpilot, Feefo, Google My Business, etc. This will help your audience connect with you and your site. Do you know what makes an even easier connection? Human faces. Show your humanity, show that you are real people and your audience will be more inclined to trust you. If everything is AI, automated, and robotic, your readers or site visitors will be turned off.
A good benefit of having customer trust is that when you do the puke-on-the-page strategy, people will automatically let a few things slide. It’s like when a loved one, mentor, or someone close to you that you trust occasionally mispronounces a word or does something imperfectly. Do you throw your hands up and abandon them? No, and neither will your customers if you have their trust.
You can put so many things on your website that will build trust like reviews, case studies, your experience, etc. This is why the ‘About us’ page is so important; it’s all about brand building. You can even just Google “How do I build trust with my website?”; it all helps. Once again, the more solutions you provide to your potential customers’ problems, the easier this will all be. Some sites and businesses are scared of giving away all the information they have just in case people don’t get in contact, but objective statistics will beg to differ. A good conversion rate for any website is about 5%. This means that out of every 100 people who visit your website, if 5% of them contact you, then you’ve done a good job. If 10% of those 5% become customers, then you’ve done a really good job.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone will be your customer and not everyone is willing to spend money on services that you’re providing; this doesn’t mean you should refrain from giving useful information and gatekeep it for paying customers. Most people will turn to someone (like your site) for help on even the simplest of problems, so why not oblige them and become a trusted name in your industry? If there’s one thing Google LOVES at the top of their search page it’s trusted names in industries.
Extra Tip: Prepare for the Coming of AI
These basics are pretty much how SEO works in 2024 and will continue to work in 2025, 2026, 2027, and to infinity and beyond, but there’s one factor creeping up on the SEO industry and that’s AI. The rumblings in the world of SEO at the moment are all about AI killing Google, but will it really happen? Maybe. While it’s true that ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools are making some elements of search engines and search results redundant, an overhaul and complete switch is not going to happen overnight.
So, what does this mean? It means you have to prepare your website for the AI future, but how? Aside from being trustworthy and creating good content, it’s worth checking out schema code and rich snippets. Make your information as available as possible for search engine crawlers. If you’re a WordPress user, using rich snippets and schema code is as simple as installing a plugin like Yoast or Rank Math for keywords or FAQs.
The thing about AI is that it can’t conjure up information out of thin air, it can only regurgitate information. Although AI crawlers are taking information from websites, they’re getting more mindful about where that information came from. This is because very large AI companies are getting sued by big names accusing them of stealing or regurgitation. Eventually, ChatGPT and other AI tools will have to include a source for their information, and what does that sound like? Exactly, Google! Google elements like info boxes, videos, etc. all come from schema code, so the traditional method of bringing up only search results is long dead anyway.
Takeaway
Having a solid SEO strategy is a cornerstone of growing any business in 2024 (and beyond) and it all comes down to two simple steps: keyword research and solid content creation. Figuring out the questions people are asking and responding to them is a surefire way to nail SEO and ranking, and you can do it all for free with a little bit of help finding out what people need. At the end of the day, being genuine is the key to good marketing and it has been for the past several decades, and don’t forget to keep an eye out for AI.
Last Updated on December 20, 2024
