The best SEO campaign and high rankings won’t help you if you don’t take user behavior and preferences into consideration. It starts with decisions as simple as the keywords and phrases you choose to try and rank for. If you choose something that your target audience and potential clients aren’t looking for or if the keyword phrase, your content, and your offer don’t match, that keyword ranking is doing you no good.
But it goes much deeper than that. What the search engines like Google want to see happen when someone clicks on a high ranking search result, matters. They want someone to click on that link, go to your site and spend some time there consuming your content (think Wikipedia). What they don’t want to see are low clicks (in comparison to other search results on that same page), or worse have someone click through to your site, hit the back button, and then go look at a different site. That’s the worst!
What does that mean for you as a content creator? Well, always create your content for your target audience first. If you’re looking at a list of keywords that you want to create content around, ask yourself if a particular search term matches your audience and the content you share. If so, go ahead, if not, move on to a better keyword choice.
If you write about fishing, you may mistakenly get people looking for the television show Catfish if you use that term repeatedly in the wrong way and without other related fishing terms. People may click on your article and immediately leave when they realize they have the wrong article.
Write your content for your readers first and then, when it’s written and polished, go back and look at the title.
Are you using the keyword in the title? If not, can you rework it and still have a compelling title. Remember this will be the headline that shows on social media and in the search results. The same goes for metadata like the description and the URL. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, do a quick Google search and look at what those individual search results look like.
Last but not least scan through the content and be sure you’re using the keyword once or twice in the content along with related words and phrases. For example, if you wrote an article about living room decor, you’d want to think about whether it also makes sense to use the words family room or front room as well. Search engines are smart and these variations of your keywords and related keywords help them determine what your content is about.
With well-written, targeted content you will ensure that your audience clicks on your links and stays around, which will help you move up in the search engine rankings. Not sure if that’s the kind of content you’re creating? Ask your readers if this is what they were looking for. If it isn’t, they will definitely let you know.