I’ve had the pleasure a while back to stumble upon an article by Heather Lloyd-Martin not just tackling WordPress SEO but copywritting in general and the steps needed to properly get where you want to.
She made a very interesting analogy between SEO and real-life:
And it couldn’t be hitting closer to home. How are you going to find the road to the front page of search engines without a map? A map you created yourself or one created by a cartographer that does this for a living?
The route to the front page of Google isn’t as forgiving as the one you took to get to Chicago. If you make a wrong turn on the internet it takes more than a shift into reverse to get you back on track. It might take months to get back on track depending on what you did wrong. You might never get to rank high enough on Google not because your content isn’t good but because it doesn’t rise above the huge amount of information available.
Before implementing the technology and rules you must first create said rules. And to create the rules you must review your content.
What are your expectations?
What do you want to accomplish? Getting higher on search results, that’s for sure.
But why do you want to get there? To get a higher CTR.
Why? Why do you want a higher CTR? To get more popular. To rise above the clouds. To get your product visible? Or your content? To create a mail database for further uses?
You need to break everything down to it’s basics.
The pool of questions is quite large but you need to focus on the basics. What is your goal and what ways are there to achieve it. What are the best ways to achieve it.
You can focus more on Google and not achieve your goals because your product is meant towards the local audience. Just the same you can focus on social media and not get the results you want because your public is not really interested in what you have to sell/say. The second is easier to fix since all there needs to be done is extend the audience towards the proper demographic.
As you can see there are a lot of problems and each one has a solution. But as is in life in order to fix something you must first find out what the problem is.
Heather managed to sum up some of the more important questions one might ask in order to asses his content or product:
– What is the per-page keyphrase research strategy? When’s the last time you researched your keyphrases?
– What are the overarching company benefits? What about the specific product/service benefits?
– Who is coming to this page? Is it an admin assistant who is gathering information for his supervisor? A time-challenged COO? What do they need to see to feel comfortable with the content?
– What phase of the buy cycle is your prospect in when they reach a certain landing page?
– What do you want people to do when they reach your landing page? Is there a secondary goal (like subscribing to your newsletter?).
– What are the upsell opportunities?
– What products/services make your company the most money?
After you’ve finished assessing these points it’s time to start creating content based on the answers you’ve collected.
WordPress SEO won’t ease the process of creating
Take Squirrly’s WordPress SEO plugin for an example. It won’t create your content. It is merely a tool that will point you in the right direction. Think of it as a guide. It helps you research the keywords, it helps you research the current buzz and it’ll help you optimize but you will need to do the research regarding the content that will suite your needs best and how to market it.
You need a strategy before throwing your content out there. Something copywritters have dealt with for many years.
You can find inspiration in both successful stories and unsuccessful ones. See what worked best for some and at the same time learn from others mistake. Also keep in mind that the internet is ever changing. What worked for some in the past might not be viable in the prest.
Unique/original content aside, it’s all about researching. And as much as Squirrly is dealing with WordPress SEO you need to deal with knowing the “What”,”When” and “How”. What to write, when to post and how to promote.
