3 Ways To Win At SEO In 2017

1. What He Said

No matter what line of business you are in or what your sales and marketing strategy is, there is only one sure way to ensure SEO success in 2017… listen to your customers. Whether online or offline, listening to your customers’ needs and then finding ways to meet them is sure to drive customer satisfaction (not to mention profits) way up. Just look at retail giant Zara. Their entire business model is designed to deliver what their customers want. Store managers feed back what customers like, what they don’t and what they’re looking for, and Zara responds immediately.

Your SEO strategy shouldn’t be any different. You need to listen to what your customers want. Which means using a keyword planner to find out what they are searching for. Then, you need to create user-centric content that tells your customers that their search is over. They have reached their final online destination and you have everything they could possibly need.

2. Stay On Track

While creating user-centric content is important, it is about as useful as a tea bag at a stag do if users aren’t taking action. Which is why tracking performance and measuring results is so important. If your online users aren’t converting, it doesn’t matter that you ranked first on Google for every keyword or search phrase in your keyword planner.

There are a number of tools you can use to track and measure performance. Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are great (free) places to start. You can monitor traffic to your website, view on-page performance and track conversions online. You can look at which pages are performing, which pages aren’t and optimise accordingly. You can even do split tests on a change to a specific page or landing page to measure its impact on your conversion rate, before rolling the change out across your website.

3. Idiot Proof Your Website

Finally, the most important thing you can do is make your website idiot proof. No matter how many times we throw around words like user experience, the online journey and customer-centric websites, far too many businesses are still making the same mistakes. Just because you know where your services pages are or how to navigate back to the home page, doesn’t mean your customers do.

Keep your navigation visible on every page – even if it is tucked away in a corner. Make sure every link, button and call to action works on each and every page. Whether in the footer or the main navigation, make sure customers can contact you. And if you have the time and resources, install a live chat to help your customers complete the journey from first click to final checkout. In short, keep it simple and idiot proof to use.

So there you have it. 3 easy ways to win at SEO in 2017. To find out more about SEO, keyword research and user experience, contact us today.