Website content incorporating SEO is part of a larger overall picture that has to be kept in mind. To start, answer the following questions:
- Is the site being created or recreated from scratch? Or does content need to be rewritten on an existing site?
- If it’s an existing site, what is or isn’t working?
- Who is your target audience? Are there multiple markets?
If you’re working with an SEO professional and are responsible only for the content development, he or she can help you identify which sites outrank yours and which ones you should target.
SEO is a game of keeping up with the Joneses that forces each site to create the most engaging content. Some of the competition will be significantly better than you at this, and that’s okay. I wouldn’t tell a yellow belt karate student to fight a black belt. I’d tell him to try to become the yellow belt champ.
Keep in mind your time and money budget and the scope of your audience and you’ll be able to hone in on a realistic goal. A small shoe store in Northern California should not aim to be the top hit for “shoes,” or not even necessarily “shoes, Northern California,” but they may be able to claim the top spot for “designer shoes in Northern California”.
SEO forces you to think outside the box. Maybe you always figured that visitors to your site were looking for one thing in particular, but you might be able to corner a related market. This would push up your site hits and links, and eventually that could make you even more attractive to your main audience.
For example, a computer retailer in San Diego might conduct some SEO research and find that “computer repair” is a really popular search term, and so is “computer repair San Diego”. In fact, it’s so popular that it’s a market they couldn’t enter without breaking the budget. They might find, though, that “office relocation” is a less popular, though related, search term, and with a little work, they could be the top hit for that query.
After a while, the site moves up in the rank of Google and other search engine hits. As that happens, more users click on it and link to it. The site becomes more established, more valuable online real estate. It may then be ready to compete on the level of more popular keyword search terms.
What does this mean for the content writer? You have to rewrite the site content, or maybe even restructure it to accommodate the new keywords. Consider making the new keywords a drop-down menu, or the topic of an article or blog post on the site and refer to it often.
By: Ilene Rosenblum
