Josh Barney — April 22, 2020 Every webmaster wants more traffic.
More traffic means more visitors, more visitors mean more opportunities and more opportunities mean greater financial reward.
As a marketing director and blog owner, my favourite category of traffic is organic.
BTW: An organic visitor is somebody who visits your website by route of a search engine.
The reason I love this type of visitor so much is that these are people who are actively seeking your solution.
They have gone to a search engine, made a query and found your website because they have a problem they’d like to be solved, they’d like to find more information (research) or because they’re looking to buy.
When it comes to traffic derived from social, email or referral (external links), in most cases, your visitors are being disrupted from their internet browsing. In other words, you’re disrupting them from their desired destination.
Whereas when it comes to organic, you are their desired destination.
The Most Common Mistake
A lot of my content strategy, particularly for Einstein Marketer’s agency blog, is to drive organic traffic to the website. And over several years’ experience, plenty of testing and a ton of research, I’ve discovered that almost every single tactic created by SEO ‘gurus’ doesn’t work very well.
Their biggest mistake is – focussing too much on keywords.
BTW: A keyword is a search term made on a search engine
When you focus tightly on keywords, it becomes the base of your strategy – demanding that everything else be built out from it.
In theory this makes perfect sense, except for one big problem – the target users who are making searches, are people.
People are unpredictable, easily-lead (particularly by new trends) and emotional – and the actions of digital marketers are sending them further in this direction.
This is why adopting an SEO strategy that looks a little like this probably isn’t getting you the results you deserve:
- Keyword Research and selection
- Content created around keyword
- Force content to fit your ideal target audience
This three-step strategy makes up the basis of most website’s SEO plan, and it’s because so many people follow this strategy, that we’ve been able to get so far ahead.
The Mentality Shift
Instead of looking at people like they’re just a bunch of keywords – think of them as people!
The most important thing you can do in SEO is to really understand who you want to visit your website – perform tons of customer research – understand who they are, and anticipate the problems that they will experience.
When you understand this, you can reverse the aforementioned 3 step strategy, and make search traffic truly work for you:
- Understand and anticipate target audience’s needs and pain points
- Create content that helps, entertains and gives value directly to them based on your knowledge of them
- Optimise this content for search with suitable keywords
This simple reversal in the 3 steps will make a massive difference to your search traffic and your organic traffic’s behaviour after visiting your website.
When you create content that is truly focussed on helping them (not just herding them up from a search engine) you’re much more likely to get higher subscription sign-ups, greater sales and more repeat visitors (and followers).
That’s it, it really is that simple.
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