SEO To Drive Traffic to Your Website and Grow Your List

by | Feb 20, 2019 | Articles, BLOG, Content

"seo-checklist'

Use this checklist to ensure your SEO is working hard to drive traffic to your lead magnet pages.

Keywords

  • Do not skip keyword research. It’s vital to understand the terms people are using to search for the information they are seeking.
  • Use some intent-based keywords to target more qualified prospects. For example, if a person were to search for the term “child car seats”, there are several ways you could attract them:
    • Offer information about styles and features of car seats
    • Offer images of car seats
    • Compare the top 10 car seats on the market today
    • Sell them a car seat
    • Tell you where to buy a car seat in their city

If the person were simply looking for information on styles of car seats, you wouldn’t want to send them, via your keywords, to your shop or sales page. Instead, you’d want to send them to a post that gives them the details they are looking for… and then leads them through the process of learning more, choosing the right car seat for their needs and purchasing options.

  • Types of intent:
    • Navigation intent is used to reach a specific site or page. I.E. when people enter Amazon in the search to go to the Amazon.com site.
    • Transactional intent is used when people are looking to buy something. I.E. when people search for “homes for sale in “. These keywords might include words like discount, buy, sale, shipping, best price and so forth.
    • Informational intent is when searchers are looking for information on a topic. They have a question they need answered. I.E. “immunization schedule for 0-5 years old”
    • Investigational intent (sometimes lumped in with informational) is what people do prior to buying. They may search for which cars have the best safety ratings or which company offers the best selection of a product.
  • Choose primary and secondary keywords that share intent.
  • How to choose intent-based keywords:
    • Google search results. Search your main keyword:
      • Look at the elements of ads shown on page one of the search results. Are they selling you something, showing you options, information?
      • Mouse over the ‘sponsored’ icon on the ad and see what Google has to say about the intent.
      • Check the organic listings shown on the results page. Are they trying to sell or teach you something?

If both show similar results, chances are that’s the main intent of

  • Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are words or terms related to your main keyword. LSI Graph can help you discover some good LSI terms.
  • Other ways to come up with keywords
    • During your Google search look at the keywords being used on ads and organic listings.
    • Look at the related searches at the bottom of the search page.

SEO

  • Audit your existing site and content to see which pages are still performing well and which aren’t. Neil Patel has an SEO Analyzer tool to help you do this. SEMRush also has a great site audit too.
  • Make sure your site is responsive, meaning the information and elements automatically resize based on the device accessing it.
  • Ensure everything on your site (with the exception of those you purposely want hidden) are accessible to search engines. It does no good to optimize for search engines if their bots cannot crawl your site. To make sure your site can be crawled, use Google Search Console and look for crawl errors.
  • Reduce the time it takes to load your website. Google has a mobile speed tool that you can use. If you have a high-load time, you will need to adjust some things on your site including compressing large image files, reducing pop-ups or at least making them mobile-friendly.
  • Ensure your site is optimized for mobile SEO. If you’ve been using Google Analytics for a while, you can check your account to see which pages are optimized for mobile and which are not. You can also tell what percentage of your traffic comes from mobile devices. If you haven’t used Analytics, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to see whether or not your page is mobile friendly.
  • Optimize for questions. Mobile users are using voice to search so when creating your content, optimize for those questions as well. You can do this by including questions in your headings, format bulleted lists properly, and include the questions and answers in the page content.
  • Video is driving traffic like crazy and its popularity is only increasing. People of all ages are watching videos so be sure to use them in your marketing strategies, optimized of course.
  • Add your keywords to:
    • Page titles
    • Header tags
    • Meta descriptions
    • On-site and out-going links
    • Page content
    • Image alt tags
    • Other content such as video & audio titles, tags and descriptions.
  • Create content that specifically matches searcher intent. Create some that relate to the LSI keywords. And create some that uses other keywords you have selected and also variations of the keywords or phrases you’ve chosen.
  • Post a variety of content formats including some short pieces of 400-500 words and longer pieces with 2,000-3,000 words.
  • Optimize everything you do off-site including your account profiles, inbound links, videos, audios, signatures, directory listings, review sites and so forth.

 

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