Chapter 1
In This Chapter
The slogan “Content is king!” has been stated and restated in every blog, forum, conference, and seminar that has anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO) or Internet marketing. Content includes all the stuff inside your website: everything from the words you read, to the pictures and videos you view, to the audio you listen to. In this chapter, we teach you all about the most important content element for SEO — the words on the page. The text content draws people to your site, starting with the brief title that shows up on a search results page. Content holds a visitor’s interest long enough to read your page and, hopefully, move on to do more. Content is what gives your website credibility with both your visitors and other sites so that they want to endorse you with a link or purchase. Content tells the search engines what you’re all about. Content proves (or disproves) that you know what you’re talking about.
And content takes hours and hours and even laborious days to create. If you feel overwhelmed by the need to write tons of new content, we understand. The prospect of writing page after page of content may make you want to crawl under the nearest desk, but the truth is, your website really cannot do without it. Good content and plenty of it is needed if you want to rank well with the search engines and attract users who convert into customers (however you define that conversion). For this reason, Book V, which deals with content creation, may contain the most valuable pages in this book.
Good, relevant content is your single most potent SEO tool. It allows you to do the following:
In this chapter, you think through how to create the best content for your site’s purposes and target audience. You first need to understand whom your site needs to appeal to, so we begin by discussing what demographic information you need to know about your target audience and how you can find it out. Next, you discover how to choose a dynamic tone and style that can effectively communicate with your audience and yield conversions. Last, you find out how to create a persona (a profile that represents your target audience based on calculated averages of their buying processes and demographics) so that you can design appropriate content that satisfies a specific, highly targeted group.
Before you communicate anything, asking “Who is my audience?” is a great first step. You might be an expert in your field, but unless you can explain what you know in a way that your target audience understands, you can’t communicate your expertise. With your website, your job is not only to communicate but also to persuade, because you want conversions (visitors who make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or take whatever action your website requires). Understanding who your audience is becomes even more essential in order to better target your conversions.
Many new web marketers make the mistake of thinking they don’t have a target audience: They see the Internet as a vast crowd of people and just want them to come to their sites. But attracting visitors to your site who then convert requires specific targeted marketing. The Internet population includes many types of people, and the more precisely you can figure out who your target visitors are, the more effective you can be at attracting and holding their interest and making conversions.
Beyond knowing who your target audience is, you also want to find out what they need. You know what your website offers. Now turn your chair around and look at your site from the other direction. Why would people come to your site? What goal would they be trying to meet?
You want to be sure to meet your visitors’ needs first before trying to motivate them to do anything else. Imagine you’ve spent two hours working and sweating in the hot sun to fix a broken sprinkler in your yard. You finally get it under control and walk toward the house for a cold drink. You have only one thing on your mind: your thirst. If another family member meets you at the door to show you something, how attentive will you be? You’re probably not going to give her much attention until your need for a cold refreshment is satisfied.
Similarly, your website visitors come to your site with a need in mind, and your first priority should be to meet that need. It may be to get information. It may be to research a product to buy. It may be to find a better price, free shipping, or some other special deal on a product they’ve already decided to buy. When you figure out what your site visitors’ goals are, you can make sure your web pages deliver.
Meet each visitor’s goal in the easiest, quickest way possible. If your site sells choir robes, help your visitor pick out the right styles, fabrics, sizes, and quantities as smoothly as possible. You can present lots of textual information to help him make the best choices, but be careful not to distract him with cute videos of choir performances, or clutter up your shopping cart page with Flash animations. His goal is to purchase choir robes. Your goal is to help him do it as directly and pleasantly as possible. Do this by leaving clues in your web content for your visitors. Tell them how to accomplish their goal. Remember that the trigger words for shopping and research differ: buy, free, and sale appeal to different visitors than how-to, step-by-step instructions, and more information.
The best way to begin researching your target audience is to look at your existing customers. (We call them “customers” for ease of writing, but depending on your business model, you might call them subscribers, members, clients, or another term.) What do you know about the people already on your customer list? You probably won’t succeed in gathering all this information in the following list, but here are a few types of demographics to look for. These facts are helpful in profiling your target audience:
http://www.reviewtrackers.com/43-percent-google-searches-local-business-listed-sites-find-you/
).In addition to examining the customer data you have, you can look at industry statistics. Find out what data is available out there. Do some homework online and track down information sources. If there’s a trade association for your industry, see if it can provide statistics, member rosters, and other types of information. You might find news articles, court cases, studies, or who knows what else, but see what’s out there that gives you more information about your typical customer.
Consider interviewing past and current members of your target audience to find out more about them. A typical method is to ask users to complete a form on your website. It might be a sign-up form at the beginning of your conversion process or a feedback form you pop up on the screen at the end of a process. Or you might prefer to interview the old-fashioned way and directly contact people by mail, phone, or email. A survey can work great, although you may need to offer some incentive to the user for filling it out (a discount, a coupon, or some other prize).
When interviewing people, try to gather some personal demographic information (such as the items in the section “Looking at current customer data,” earlier in this chapter) as well as some feedback about their experience on your website. It’s a golden opportunity for valuable feedback from past customers. Here are some good things to learn during your interview:
Include these two questions in your survey to get a technical picture of your customers' awareness:
You can also use surveys in conjunction with the data your analytics tool gathers (for more on analytics tools, read on) to discover information about your customers' browsing habits. You can easily get the following data:
Your website’s server logs contain valuable data about your visitor counts and their behavior. It’s also a good idea to have analytics embedded in your web pages, which are program routines a website can use to track user behavior on the website. Talk to your IT department or webmaster and see what they can tell you about your web traffic and the user behavior on each page.
www.google.com/analytics
): This is free analytics software and resources from Google that we recommend you take advantage of.www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing.html
): Adobe is one of the top vendors for analytics programs.www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org
): The trade association for web analytics professionals is a good source for information.Analytics tools can look at your recent website traffic and tell you where visitors came from. Further, demographics reports inside Google Analytics can give you statistics about your web audience such as percentages by gender, age, and so on. And reports in your free Google Search Console account (www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
) can even tell you what search terms people have used in Google searches to find your website.
Analytics tools are extremely valuable for SEO. Knowing where your users come from can give you clues to their goals. For instance, if your site sells shoes and you find a lot of visitors coming from youth soccer sites, they’re likely looking for children’s soccer shoes and cleats. This information can help you style your site to help those visitors find exactly what they need.
The way your content comes across to your potential customers is as important as the services and actions you have to offer visitors. When you write content for your website, your text should
The tone of a written piece can make or break it. Tone refers to the writer’s attitude toward the subject matter and toward the reader. Tone creates an emotional response in readers. The wrong tone can turn off an audience within the first sentence or two.
When people talk about the way a piece “comes across,” they’re talking about its tone. In speaking, people call it the “tone of voice,” and it affects communication powerfully. Dogs, for example, can tell a lot by the sound of their master’s voice: They might come running or hide their tails based solely on their master’s tone. In written communication, an author’s tone comes through in more subtle ways. Word choice, sentence length, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure — all these and more convey the tone.
Your writing tone should support your site goal and be appropriate for your target audience. For example, if you're a heavy-metal band promoter, you wouldn’t want to greet your visitors with rainbows and ponies and a jaunty message like, “You’ve arrived! Mr. Ponypants wants you to have a super fun day!” The bouncy, enthusiastic tone is all wrong for the target audience and would probably have visitors heading straight for their Back button. There's nothing wrong with heavy metal or ponies, but typically fans of each aren't found in the same audience. Instead, you’d want the tone to come across as rebellious or rowdy, meeting your target audience in the same spirit they're showing. Only then would you be able to achieve your site’s conversion goal, which is to engage people and interest them in becoming clients.
Think about what response you would want your target audience to have when they read your website. The emotional response your tone evokes in your readers can make them want to stay or run away, so choose it carefully.
After you know who your target audience is, you can adjust your website to be appropriate for them. We talk in Book IV, Chapter 1 about tailoring your website design to your target audience. In Book V, we focus on tailoring the content style to your target audience.
A blog (originally short for “web log”) on your website can provide a platform to let your voice be heard and interact with your target audience. Content marketers often consider their site’s blog to be the axis of their community outreach. The blog connects people to your website and pulls them in with a regular supply of fresh, timely content that can be linked to and shared across various social media channels.
Blog posts can be published more quickly and easily than static web pages. Blog posts can cover anything related to your business or industry. If new legislation is passed, write a timely article explaining the new law’s impact on your customers. If you attend an industry event, you can use your blog to share ten takeaways you learned that might help others. The possibilities are endless; the point is, blog software makes creating a post fairly painless.
Your tone in a blog post can usually be quite conversational and more personal than on your main website. On the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog, for example, writers often inject their own thoughts (“Seriously?”) and reactions (“That’s awesome!”) into their posts. Have a conversation with your reader, as if he or she were sitting across from you asking questions about your subject. If you think about what your reader needs to know, you can break down any topic into useful information that’s friendly and interesting.
The blog environment is perfect for showing personality and helping people feel like they can relate to your company or organization. Far more than static web pages can, a blog lets you “put a face” on your brand. It’s not just the company owner or CEO who can create this kind of genuine human interaction for a brand. The best brands encourage trusted employees to use their own names and faces, representing the company but also becoming known as recognizable individuals in the industry. As an example, the writers’ names and faces appear alongside the articles on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog, as shown in Figure 1-2. When a brand empowers its blog writers (and social media writers) to be themselves as they work, the audience sees the people behind the logo. Suddenly, your brand becomes more human and more trustworthy. And people feel like they know you.
Most blog software is fairly simple to set up. We cover more of the benefits and how-tos of blogging in Chapter 7 of this minibook.
To help you evaluate your website from your target customer’s perspective, you can create a fictional web persona based on all the customer data you accumulated.
A persona is like a role, and it includes how a person acts, talks, thinks, believes, and so on. The customer web persona you create is a profile that represents your target audience based on calculated averages of your customers’ buying processes, goals, and demographics.
Companies use personas as user “archetypes.” These archetypes are a compilation of general personality traits, behaviors, wants, and needs attributed to a type of target customer, which can be applied to a larger category of customer types. This helps guide their decisions concerning product launches, new features, customer interaction, and site design. It’s easier to evaluate your website from a particular Jane Doe's or John Doe’s perspective than just imagining a vague customer group. By understanding the goals and patterns of your audience, your company can create archetypes to help create services to satisfy a specific, highly targeted group.
Your goal is to create a persona that encompasses the most complete picture of your target audience. In fact, you may want to create several personas, depending on your website’s various goals and how varied your customers are. Linda, the mother of two, has different motivations for being on your site than Debbie, the high-powered sales exec, or Fred, the college student. Creating more than one persona allows you to produce the maximum amount of appeal to your real-life customers. Creating effective personas helps you
Creating personas helps you identify your customers’ buying decision processes to allow you to maximize your conversion rate. Acquiring and analyzing the type of data listed in the sections, “Looking at current customer data” and “Interviewing customers,” earlier in this chapter, can help you develop a more complete picture of who your audience really is, how they spend their time, and what they value as being important. After looking at this information, you can start to see patterns emerge. These patterns are the basis for the personas you create.
In looking for patterns, notice the similarities and differences between your customers through your research. Keep in mind that personas represent your audience’s behavior patterns, not job descriptions, locations, or occupations. Although it’s important to be aware of this information, these details should not be the basis of your archetypes. A properly defined persona gives you a well-rounded picture of your customers’ attitudes, skills, and goals; it's not just a résumé that only offers a surface view.
After you have your data, group the information in a way that makes the most complete picture of a person. This includes assembling key traits (such as behavior patterns and similar buying processes) to try to form a cohesive “person.” You should be able to use the collected information to form a small group of “people” that you feel represent your audience. Each persona (like your real audience) should be different, wanting and looking for different things.
After you have your persona, don’t keep her (or him) to yourself. Share it with the other members of your company to get their insights. They may have valuable opinions that help you narrow or fill out the personality of your customer. Use this time to fill in any blanks. Name your persona to differentiate her from the others: Don't just call her Jane Doe. Choose a name that you can believe in, not one that's just a stand-in.
You now have your persona: You’ve named her, you know where she comes from, and you know what she’s looking for. But you’re not done. It is now time to put your persona into action. Use your persona to role-play the following:
Here is an example of a persona and how you can put it to use. Alice is a competitive personality. Social status is very important to her, and she appreciates it in others. She tends to be impulsive and doesn’t mind the impersonality of doing things online as long as she is able to get what she needs quickly and efficiently. She is looking for verifiable results and quantifiable bottom lines. Social interaction is not important to her. She is willing to pay more to get a little extra. She is unmarried and does not see marriage in her near future.
Alice is very Internet-savvy and uses the Internet for ten or more hours per day. She has multiple email accounts from various service providers and does all her shopping and banking online. Alice works for an Internet company and has just purchased a modest condo in the suburbs outside a large metropolitan city.
By analyzing the profile of Alice, you can better target her needs. Based on this, you can see that her primary concern is for quick, expert information. Alice is an impulsive buyer; the key to acquiring her conversion is to give her information in a quick, easy-to-read format while touching on her desire for prestige and quality. She considers convenience, as well as easy access, important. You can guess that when she first visits your site, her eye quickly scans the content for keywords. If you lose her interest for a moment, she’s gone.
The profile also gives you an idea of Alice’s experience level with your product. This information can help you decide how to target her. Here are two example scenarios:
Using Alice’s persona helps you identify the language that most likely appeals to her and satisfies her motivations and needs. When you’re testing out new features or campaign plans, make sure to keep Alice in mind. Ask yourself these types of questions for each of your personas:
Personas provide many benefits. First, by speaking with your customers directly while gathering the data to create your personas, you have taken the first important steps to creating brand loyalty. Taking time to ask them about their needs and their interests shows them that you are interested in who they are, not just that you are out to make a sale. You want to learn about them, their goals, and what is important to them so that you can make your product better for them. Customers are likely to remember such a move and are more likely to do business with you in the future. By investing in them, you have made it easier for them to invest in you.
Secondly, your personas can alert you to problems you might not have known about. For example, while doing your research, you may discover that your customer base is larger and wider than you imagined. Knowing this shows you that there are two or more very different audiences that you must address. This could lead to creating a whole new product or set of instructions to fit more advanced users, while still catering to your more inexperienced ones. It could also lead to adding more pages to your website or incorporating more appropriate text on each page.
Many companies resist the idea of personas because they don’t understand how they work. They may design personas that are too vague to be efficient in helping with the direction of their company. If not done correctly, personas may cause companies to pigeonhole their audience, negating the basic purpose of creating personas.
Another drawback of using personas is that no matter how much research you do or how deeply you analyze it, you can never know for sure that your customers feel exactly the way that your fictional personas do. If you tailor your campaigns too closely to a persona, you risk alienating some of your other customers. This is why it's important to create multiple personas: You have a better chance at targeting the largest number of users.
At the end of the day, despite your best efforts at analyzing your customers’ personalities, all you are left with is a best guess about what they’re looking for and who they really are. Using web personas allows your guess to be an educated one and provides your company with an invaluable tool to help keep users’ interests in mind.
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