Getting Started in SEO

Getting started in SEO can become confusing if you do not know how to begin. Business owners use SEO as a powerful tool to generate qualified leads for higher conversion rates.

Following this post are some articles we will publish to take you to an SEO journey that will enlighten and help you learn more about this optimization process. For this post, we will give a unique perspective of how you can effectively start SEO that is low cost and that uses more key questions as solutions to your market’s problems.

SEO Can Be Confusing but Not Scary

When you properly perform SEO, it can result in generating leads. Your content can continuously rank on search engines for many years. Although this is great news for certain companies, other businesses might still ignore the power of SEO.

There can be several reasons for it, and others might hesitate to maximize the use of SEO because they do not know where to start. The process can indeed be difficult, intimidating, and overwhelming, but it does not have to be scary.

There is always an easier way to get started with SEO basics that ensures you are positioning your business for success.

Website Personas Matter

If you want to learn the techniques of SEO and improve your website, begin at a point of determining who you are and who you want to serve – website personas. Asking questions related to these is crucial as a starting point of SEO, but many businesses tend to skip this. As a result, they fail.

Website personas or marketing personas are groups of people in your market who create the foundation for what follows in the SEO process. They are important beyond data because of the following reasons:

• With diverse groups of people comes different issues.
• Various issues have unique needs.
• Different needs have different solutions.
• With various solutions comes different phrases or terms that these group personas use to search on search engines.

These phrases or terms allow you to create a list of keywords for each group persona, expanding your keyword universe and chances to rank on search engines.

If you cannot determine who you are and who you want to serve, you cannot understand the needs of your customers and how you can provide solutions to their needs. You cannot create successful SEO strategies with this lack of information.

Asking yourself these questions lets you create variables you can use to act, analyse, and research. The answers to your questions will lead you to knowing what matters to people. You can then focus on their issues, the solutions they need, and how you can help them.

Remember that the core of SEO is a combination of questions and answers. People use search engines to find answers to their questions, and search engines give people the best answers they can find online. When you execute SEO properly, you are helping search engines locate your content to match or answer questions.

By knowing who you want to serve, the questions people ask, and how you can assist them helps you become successful in SEO.

SEO and the Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, a theory of psychological health that prioritizes the fulfilment of human needs. In his theory, he stated that there are five levels of human needs: psychological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. 

These levels of needs affect people’s behaviour and the way they interact with the world. This concept closely ties to SEO because people look for answers online based on their needs at a certain time.

The needs depend on people’s location within a buying cycle or their information journey. Searches might be basic or advanced, the beginning or end of a process, or transactional or informational.

Knowing where you are at the Hierarchy of Needs is important because the key to become successful is finding the point where your market and what your offer meets.

How to Find Your Market Personas

The following are questions you ask yourself to help you find the right website personas for your business. These questions can be related to you, your products and services, or your company.

• How do you commonly describe your business to customers?
• Which business accomplishments are you most proud of?
• What was your customers’ feedback on your products and services?
• Why did your customers choose your brand over others?
• What is different about you from your competitors?
• What benefits can your customers take advantage of?
• Is there a niche that is more important to you?
• What is your passion?
• What are your greatest skills?
• What are your areas of expertise?

Note these questions and allow your mind to run though each question to answer them. When you are done answering, look at your answers again and replace words that can be jargon to your market.

Write your answers again in simpler terms like you are explaining to old people or children. This SEO exercise allows you to get the terms that people might use to search online.

This is brainstorming who you are, who you want to serve, and how you assist people. Once you can formulate this, you can start to build a keyword universe and plan your content.

How to Know the Types Market Personas in Your Target Market

To know the classification of your website personas, you must ask yourself the following SEO questions:

• What is the budget range of your market?
• Are they in different regions, or do they speak various languages?
• Do they have different job positions like manager or entry level?
• Do they belong in various business industries like accounting, IT, or health?
• Are they advanced or beginners?
• Are they small businesses or universities?
• Are they businesses or consumers?
• Are they teens, adults, or kids?
• Are they men or women?
• How will you group them? (Consider their age, gender, geography, income status, professional position, business size, industry, budget, stage in the buying cycle, product type, and customer status whether new or repeat.)

Learning this helps you group your keywords that match each classification. No matter what your chosen niche is, there are always website personas.

Criteria for Your Marketing Personas

Once you define your website personas, you should set criteria to document their data further. You can include the following:

• Name
• Description
• Goals
• Challenges
• Needs
• Decision process
• Stage of the buying cycle
• Search intent level (commercial, informational, etc.)
• Marketing channels where they spend time
• Purchase obstacles

You might know some of these criteria and not know others. That is okay because you can write down what you know now and fill in the other details later.

This helps you switch from thinking about you to thinking about your market and their needs. This also helps you in creating your keyword list.

The Importance of Human-Based SEO

In terms of SEO, Internet tools are popular and mostly used to generate qualified leads and increase conversions. But one element that is an effective SEO tool that marketers might not see is the human-based SEO.

A highly performing SEO strategy does not entirely involve outsourcing to a third-party SEO service, WordPress plugins, easy shortcuts, or marketing automation. It needs human intervention to achieve superiority in performing SEO.

Low-cost SEO services will not give you the human element for SEO, and software tools and other marketing services that automatically optimize content through algorithms will not be effective either. The key here is to understand your market on a psychological level to help them and provide solutions to their problems.

When you understand website personas, you can connect to them on a personal level to help them. You, the human, are the most powerful and effective tool in your SEO journey.

Conclusion

Allow your mind to wander and answer the necessary questions related to your SEO process. Think about you, who you want to serve, and how you want to help them and write it down.

In our next posts, we will be discussing how you can create a keyword universe using data, master the art of SEO keyword analysis and selection, and create a content calendar.

Keep your SEO a journey because it is not a destination. This way, you can rank your website successfully, generate more leads, and help people reach their goals. Stay focused on your thoughts!