How do I Develop a Keyword Strategy for my SEO (Part 1)?

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a search term that a user types into a search engine when looking for something, the search engine then returns the most relevant results based on the search term. If you don’t have the keywords that people are looking for you simply won’t be found. It’s your job to show the search engine that your keywords are the most relevant for those search terms; a solid keyword strategy is going to be an integral part of this process. By having one in place you will attract quality traffic to your website.

It’s more important than having your webpage simply showing up in search engines. You need to be thinking about click through rate, retention and conversion. You also want to provide relevant and interesting content that will engage users and keep them coming back.

Remember → Relevancy = Success

Keyword Building is a never ending process!                                   (days.eye.wordpress.com)

Where to find Keywords?

1. Hubspot Keyword SEO Tool (Paid) – http://www.hubspot.com/products/keyword-grader/
This tool offers fantastic data on your keywords, how they rank and those of your competitors. It analyses the data and makes recommendations on how you can improve your keywords and make them more relevant. We recommend this tool for anyone that is serious about improving their SEO.

2. Google Keyword Tool (Free) – https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool
You can use the advanced features to get some more detailed information. For example, you can select keywords in different languages or you can exclude certain terms. Term exclusion is great when your key term is a generic term and you want to exclude words which do not match your needs. Let’s say you sold Java Coffee you would want to exclude terms to do with the Java Programming Language as well as the Indonesian island of Java.

You can also plug in your website URL and let Google show you what it thinks your website is relevant for. It’s an opportunity to see what search terms your content shows up for. It’s useful for letting you know where your site content should be refined in terms of keywords. You may think that your site is all about Home Brewing Beer but Google may not see it that way.

3. A team brainstorm – Don’t be afraid to get a round table discussion going to eek out extra keywords. Jimmy the Intern may very well be a gold mine of new avenues to explore!

4. Good old fashioned Thesaurus – Dust off the thesaurus, or if you don’t have one check out thesaurus.com to spark some new ideas.

5. Rinse & Repeat – Keep exploring new concepts. Continual optimisation is always a good mind frame to adopt, no matter what the situation.

The Master List

The goal is to build towards ‘The Master List’, that contains all keyword opportunities and is a foundation for SEO optimisation. Refer to this list when you:

1. Create Content
2. Update Content
3. Syndicate Content (i.e. when you create content for third party websites that will link back to your site.)
4. When you Post to Social Media Channels
5. Type Anything!

Over time your list is going to get HUGE, upwards of 10,000 keywords is quite common. You’re going to need to keep things organised before you get swamped in a sea of synonyms. A good idea is to break them up into a theme. As well as helping to keep things organised you will also start to see relationships and commonalities that will help to strengthen your SEO copy.

Use the Long Tail

Long Tail Keywords                                                                                                                      (blog.mindsaw.com)

If you sold shoes you might think at first glance that you should focus on general terms like ‘shoes’, ‘trainers’ etc. However, this isn’t the case. You should really pay attention to the long tail of your keywords. More descriptive words won’t be as lucrative in terms of traffic but are highly beneficial. For example, ‘red Nike men running shoes’ is more likely to show up in the search engine results and the consumer is more likely to convert.

– General terms have a large potential audience but are highly competitive and have low conversion rates.
– Long tail terms (i.e. the more numerous and less common) have:

• Lower Competition
• Clearer Visitor Intent
• A greater chance of success

That’s Part 1 of our look at developing a keyword strategy. We’ll show you how to use these Keywords more effectively in a later post. Follow our blog and you won’t miss out on Part 2!

Thanks for reading and stay in touch with us!

Visit our website – www.woahsolutions.com
Twitter (@WoahSolutions)
Facebook (Facebook.com/WoahSolutions).

– John Byrne
www.linkedin.com/in/byrnejohn
– Mark Byrne
www.linkedin.com/in/byrnemark

How do I build my Online Community?

The Importance of Community

Community-building is about building trust and showing authenticity to your audience. Having 3,000 Twitter followers doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a community. It means you have 3,000 followers. A community is something that is active, made up of engaged brand evangelists and is an influential part of a businesses online presence. An active community of a few hundred people can have a far more positive impact than a few thousand uninterested clicks.

Building Your Community

It’s all about the community, not the product or company. Some companies may be lucky enough to have a strong enough following that there is already an active community online talking about their brand. In these situations it is important not to get scared by not being in control and try to take over. If a community senses a corporate takeover you may find a rebellion on your hands. Embrace the community and welcome them, show them that you value their support and comments.

It’s important to not forget that you’re a participant too. Listen to what your community has to say and engage in conversation. We’ll be writing a blog post about this in the future that will go into detail on best practices.

You want to be able to give your community content that it will find engaging and encourage them to share and discuss.

Content will help you forge that connection with your community.

Content that Every Business and Community need to Create:

John Jantsch mentions on SocialMediaExaminar.com  the following content types –

• Content that builds trust
• Content that educates
• User-generated content
• Other people’s content
• Content that converts

It’s Not What it Used to Be

As recent as five years ago community building was a different beast. Consumers have cottoned on to freebies and giveaways as a means of gaining their attention. These freebies were seen as enough by marketers to allow them to flood your email inbox with updates and served to very quickly disengage an audience from a brand. Numbers were often seen as good enough when it came to a community, the community manager of today realises that engagement trounces size every time.

Cultivate Community

People want value from communities that they choose to spend time being a part of. It is important to provide this value through meaningful content which can be delivered through your social media channels. This means that you’re going to have to provide similar, if not better, content to your community for free than what they would otherwise pay for. For many this feels counterintuitive but can be a very effective way to build a trustworthy audience and allows to you claim mindshare in an interested following.

How to Promote Your Community

– SEO – Make your site accessible, use Google AdWords to find usable keywords, and promote your content on social networks.
– Use Similar Blogs – Become active on blogs that are similar to yours. You can find your target audience’s networks by using Follower Wonk and FindPeopleonPlus. .
– Guest Blog – We’ve mentioned it in previous posts but there’s no harm in reminding you about it again. Ask bloggers in a similar niche to yours (and of a similar standing in terms of audience size) if you could write a post on their blog. Not only will it give them a chance to take the day off from writing a blog post but you’ll have access to a whole new audience.

Cultivating a community around your brand/company/product takes a lot of time and effort to be done correctly. Here are some tips to make it a bit easier for you.

Woah Tips

• Get to Know Your Users – Ask your community questions, encourage their involvement.
• Leverage Any and All Connections at Your Disposal – To get your community off to a good start don’t forget to let your existing connections know about it.
• Expect It to Take Time – Good things come to those who wait. A community won’t spring up overnight. To cultivate
• Connect and Help Your Community Members
• Track Everything – Regularly examine your analytics. See which content works and which doesn’t. You can tailor your content over time to what your community really wants.

To summarise, building your community is all about actively listening, engaging in conversation, being open and honest, providing content that your community finds value in and last but not least… time and hard work.

Thanks for reading and stay in touch with us!

Visit our website – www.woahsolutions.com
Twitter (@WoahSolutions)
Facebook (Facebook.com/woahsolutions).

– John Byrne
www.linkedin.com/in/byrnejohn
– Mark Byrne
www.linkedin.com/in/byrnemark

What are the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

We mentioned SEO in our last blog post ‘Why Should My Business Blog?’ so we thought it would be a good idea to delve into that now. The core idea behind SEO is that you make changes and improvements to your website so that it will rank higher organically (i.e. unpaid) in search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the ranking of a website in a search engine’s organic or unpaid search results. The higher ranking your website has the more visible it will be seen and more likely it will be clicked.  SEO will help your website become more accessible to potential customers and can have a huge impact on sales and give you a strong competitive edge.

How do Search Engines Work?  

We could write a book on how search engines work but we’re going to break the process down as simply as possible. Search engines work in a three step process.

1. Search Engines ‘read’ the content of millions of webpages. This is known as crawling.
2. These pages are then indexed, which means keeping a record of the page for easy access by the search engine.
3. When a user enters a search query the search engine returns the page based on the indexed terms and how well the page ranks according the the search engine algorithm.

Here’s what shows up in Google when you search for ‘best restaurants in dublin’.

In the image above you can see the all too familiar search engine results page. The first three results for ‘best restaurants in dublin’ are paid for through Google AdWords. The results below them appear as they are deemed by Google to be the most relevant for the search query. They are called organic search results and are not paid for (directly that is).

Remember – The main goal in SEO is to have your website indexed regularly my search engines and let them know that your website is the place to be for your topic.

Why is SEO Important?

Ranking well in search engines is vital, see it as a thumbs-up from an impartial source as to how great your website is. Think of it this way, you’re at a party and there’s a guy there who is telling everyone how great he is. There’s also a girl there who you’ve heard through friends is the bomb-diggedy. Who are you more likely to want to talk to?

SEO traffic converts very well, when asked, according to Forbes 48% of respondents voted it to be the most effective online marketing tactic for generating conversions.

A well written, SEO optimised article/blog post can compete effectively with paid ads. See it as a permanent bill board, attracting attention online alongside paid ads. Search engines want to show their users the right content, do your best to make it easier for them. So, how can you do this?

SEO Factors

There are hundreds of factors that go into determining a pages rank on a search engine. In a later blog post we’ll deal with these in more detail, but for now we’ll give you a (very) broad overview of what these factors are. There are two keys areas, that each contain their own factors.

1. Onpage – On Page Factors are to do with the architecture of your website. These include the titles you use, your headers, your tags, your keyword density and a whole lot more.

2. Offpage – Off Page Factors are to do with links going to your website. Simply put, the more people that link to your site the better.

What type of content should I post for SEO?

We’ve been asked before about whether companies should write branded or unbranded content. For us the key is having the right balance, unbranded content attracts readers looking for information on your industry while branded content can then convert these readers into leads. We mentioned something similar in our post about blogging, that is, you should post genuine articles that people want to read, not just a post tooting your company horn. Articles that people actually want to read will get shared more, commented on more and thus will rank higher as search engines will see this as the sign of a good article. You don’t hear us bragging about our fantastic online marketing services and competitive prices! The bonus is that you cast your net wider when finding an audience making your sales funnel wider. These readers can then be converted into leads.

Woah Tips

– Archived Content – You can use newsletters and additional company content that hasn’t already appeared on the web to bolster your websites content and make it more searchable. FAQs are also great for SEO.
– On Page SEO – Make sure you do a good job on your site architecture and do all you can to make it SEO friendly. A solid foundation is very important.
– Write a Blog – Blogs are fantastic for creating fresh content that search engines love.

Bonus Reading Material

– How to design a perfectly optimised web page – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Thanks for reading and stay in touch with us!

Visit our website – www.woahsolutions.com
Twitter (@WoahSolutions)
Facebook (Facebook.com/woahsolutions).

– John Bynre
www.linkedin.com/in/byrnejohn
– Mark Byrne
www.linkedin.com/in/byrnemark

Why Should My Business Blog?

In a nutshell, blogging can be hugely beneficial for businesses wanting to improve their presence online. The reasons are many. Aside from improving your organic (unpaid) search engine results, it allows your company to get involved with an online conversation that is going to continue with or without you. Not becoming involved in this conversation by not blogging (or engaging in other social media channels) is effectively opting yourself out of a conversation that you should want to have a say in if you care about your brand and your customers. Writing a blog allows you to become part of an online conversation that is going on already. It allows you to have some control over your brand image.

That being said, company blogs aren’t for everyone. Only blog if it fits your business. There are a number of things to be aware of before you decide to take the plunge with your business. We touch on these topics in this post to let you know the core of what’s involved.

HubSpot have released very encouraging stats on the benefits of blogging. According to their data, small businesses that  blog get 55% more website visitors, 102% more Twitter followers and 126% higher lead growth when compared to businesses that don’t blog. .

When customers or potential customers search for your brand or product you want to show up on Googles search results. Preferably in the top three results for your keywords. The fact is that Google loves blogs. Its search algorithm places a huge importance on fresh, up to date content which means that having a regularly updated blog will keep your company on Googles mind. Hopefully in the top three results!

Things to Consider When Deciding to Blog

You should always have in the back of  your mind, ‘is this post creating value for my readers?’ In order to gain a readership you’re going to need to offer value, something that people are going to want to share and make them want to return to your blog. Many people are worried that their blog posts may be uninteresting or that their business model doesn’t offer much to blog about. They’d be wrong! For example, a business may be an organic pasta producer. On the surface this may seem like a tough subject to write about regularly on a blog.

You would probably be correct in assuming  that but you should realise that you need to think bigger and you do not have to confine yourself to such a narrow topic. Join the dots into related areas and you will soon realise that you can blog about recipes, cooking tips and organic news. These topics fit nicely into a general theme that allows for a lot of content to be created that will attract readers and still relate to your brand.

If you can’t commit to a blog, don’t start! You should realise that making the decision to start blogging should be undertaken with the knowledge that it must be regularly updated. Abruptly stopping to post on your company blog will do you no favours when it comes to showcasing your brand.

Also recognise that it will take time to gain traction. Do not lose heart in the early days.

Do You Have the Resources to Blog?

The two main resources when is comes to blogging are Time and People.

Time – Blogs are a lot of work. It is important to remember that once you start, it is highly advised that you don’t stop. There’s nothing worse than seeing a company blog that is stale and hasn’t been updated for months. Do you have the time to keep a blog up to date?

People – Do you have the right people in-house who can create an engaging and interesting blog or do you have to outsource writing to a third-party company?

Also, it may seem like a good idea to let Jimmy the intern write your company blog. He’s cheap, can type relatively quickly and does as he’s told. However this isn’t really a good idea. Your blog is going to be your company’s voice. You want this voice to be one that is passionate and well-informed about everything your company is doing. No offence to Jimmy the intern but he may not match the criteria. You should get someone who is well versed on your company and its products and who can talk the talk. Especially when it comes to answering readers (potential leads) questions and queries.

Woah Tips

• Use Peoples First Name – When responding to readers questions it’s a great idea to use their first name to address them. It makes the blog feel more personal and will help other users feel more at ease when leaving comments of their own.
• Two Column Layout – Ideally it is better to have a two column layout. It is clean and simple and what many readers are used to. If you do decide that a three column layout is for you it has to be organised and easy to follow!
• Blog Roll – A blog roll is an area of the blog where you can list third-party blogs that may interest your readers. You want to create value for your readers to keep them coming back, think of the blog roll as an extra way to add value for your readers.
• Guest Bloggers – A way to draw in new readers is to ask other bloggers in your community to write a blog post for your blog. It can be difficult to find the right guest blogger but it can be great for bringing in fresh readers.
• Update Your Blog at least once a week – This seems like a no brainer but it can’t be emphasised enough that a barren blog is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Thanks for reading and stay in touch with us!

Visit our website – http://www.woahsolutions.com
Twitter (@WoahSolutions)
Facebook (Facebook.com/woahsolutions).

– Mark Byrne
http://www.linkedin.com/in/byrnemark