How To Get Your Ideal Clients From SEO

I’m going to give a simple and effective five step process to start attracting more attention from your ideal clients. Below are some step by step guidelines to help you attract customers rather than binge readers.

Step One: Choose a topic that focuses on money keywords.

Everybody loves to try and be creative with content, and write about something meaningful, or inspirational about their lives. But, what you need to think about is, what is the likelihood of someone reading your article and wanting to buy your product or service.

A common issue I see with content production is tons of articles that hardly get any traffic or don’t ever convert into paying customers. Put yourself in your buyers shoes, what would they search for if they needed help.

Ok, here is step one:

Choose one of your main services or keywords that relate to your product. As an example, if you’re in eLearning and focus on things like professional development, or helping companies with learning and Development, you could make your subject “Learning and Development”.

Use a tool like Keywordtool.io - And type in your keyword to get ideas and see which keywords are more popular. The tool will show alternatives phrases, so, for Learning and Development it could be, “What is Learning and Development, L&D Tools, and so forth. The tool will also give you an indication of how popular your keywords are, you then need to narrow down to which keywords indicate buying interest and which do not.

Step Two: Write a better topic than your competition.

Now you have chosen your keyword, you need to write something that outperforms your competition. Google is looking for the most popular and relevant topic to match the search term you want to be found for. If your competition are providing great content on a similar product or service then it only makes sense that they would be number one on Google.

Firstly, make sure your article is contextual and exceeds 2,000 words. Thin content or informational pages with less than 500 words don't provide enough value and won't be seen as an authoritative source of content.   

Secondly, make sure your topic is completely relevant to the search term you have chosen. That means not trying to push your bounds and cram in four other topics. Stick to one clear topic throughout.

Finally, break up your article with keyword friendly subheadings relating to your topic. Let's use the example of  “Learning and Development” You can break this article up into many different sub headings like, “What is Learning and Development, How does Learning and Development engage Employees” etc.

When creating your topic I want you to Include these five tips.  

1. Include internal links to other pages based around your topic - Lonely pieces of content with no supporting articles don't hold as much weight as cornerstone content. Neil Patel gives some great guidelines on how to do this effectively.

2. Reference some external sources in your topic - Don’t be afraid to reference statistics, or other great topics that can help your article be a better resource for your readers.

3. Add SEO Optimised headers to break up your content. - Doing this will not only help Google pick up more keywords on your page, but helps break up the content for the reader. Make sure you add the titles with <H2> Tags on your titles. This may need some development help, but takes minutes to do.

4. Keep your page title short and relevant to the article. - If your article is based around Learning and Development, then make sure you choose your most desired keyphrase as your page title, like “Learning and Development Company”, rather than “Learning and development, elearning provider, UK”. Placing a large amount of keywords in a title such as in the latter example is called keyword spamming. It doesn’t work.

5. Add images to the page and include alt tags. - Adding images to the page breaks up the content nicely and adds some weight to the page. The addition of alt tags also gives you the opportunity to add some keywords into the descriptions. The key here is to label the image to describe what the image is. Check out Mozs explanation guide here.  

Step Three: Create Supporting articles for your topic.

Google crawls your entire website and looks at relevancy when determining ranking positions. If you only have one page on your website covering a certain topic, and lots of other random pages covering different topics, this will not help your overall site performance.

- Check your Competitors for subjects

Using a command in Google, you can see all of the pages that are indexed by your competitors. As an example, you can type your main keyphrase into Google and pick the first company on page one. We’re going to check this company’s indexed pages on Google for your chosen keyword

Open a new tab and type into Google: “site:websitegoeshere.co.uk [keyphrase]” - Here is an example for learning and development, site:cipd.co.uk “learninganddevelopment” This will show you all of this company’s indexed pages for that keyword, from which you can research relevant topics to give you some ideas on what you can write about.

- Build a content pipeline

Planning content is as important as writing content. This gives you the opportunity to keep track of your content production, and visually see how your content fits into overall strategy. Here is a basic template you can use to start adding new titles too, this can be customised to fit whatever needs you have for your content production. View template here.

Using your main keyphrase you have picked, I want you to pick five other subjects on this topic and add them into a content pipeline. Using Learning and Development as an example, you could add relevant titles, such as “Learning and Development Trends”, or “How L&D will change in 2019”. So, as you can see we are staying relevant, but providing new topics to support your main article.

- Write five supporting pages and internally link them.  - Now you have the titles for your new content, I want you to write at least 800 words for each topic you have chosen. And where appropriate, make sure they link to each other.

Naturally, the articles you are writing will support each other, so link to the additional pages with words matching the topic. As an example, the Learning and Development Trends article could also have a line mentioning the <changes in L&D in 2019> This would allow for a hyperlink going to your second article. Make sure not to add more than 5-6 internal links on the page

Step Four: Promote your content with Paid Ads.

Websites with low traffic have less chance of being noticed, so to give your content the best chance, post the article on Facebook and run a paid Facebook Ad campaign.  

Promoting you content with paid ads will encourage social shares, new visits from Facebook, and broaden the horizon of the readership. Which means bloggers and website owners may see this content, and reference it on their websites, which equals more backlinks and page authority.

Social media Examiner offer some helpful tips on setting this up, or you can check out Facebook's support

Step Five: Build Relationships with website owners.

Google looks at popularity when determining a webpage’s rankings, meaning if you have a low amount of websites that mention your articles, then your popularity is going to be low. The correct terms for this is backlinks, and having great content is good, but you need backlinks to give you the best chance of getting those top page one positions.

We are going to use a very well known, laborious, but effective outreach strategy. Its called manual outreach. Below I have outlined two options for you.

Option One: The Skyscraper Technique.

The Skyscraper technique was introduced by Brian Deen, a well known SEO, so I suppose it's only fair to share his explanation of how to do this. Check out his post here

Using a backlink tool like Ahrefs, you can see the types of companies that already link to your competition. So, start by Googling your keyphrase and pick the first person on the list.

Add the website link into Ahrefs, and on the left hand side you will see “backlinks” click this section and it will show you a list of websites that link to that page.

Create a list of all the companies who show a number of 20-100 Domain Ranking (DR) - You will see these numbers listed first to the right next to the domains.

Once you have a list, send a personalised email to every person on the list informing them that you recently posted a newer, longer, and more informational version of something they are already linking to. Try and find the editorial team, rather than just a generic email address.

Option Two: Guest Posting

The aim here is to find editorial teams that are looking for additional content, and become a guest writer. Having relationships with other websites will help quickly scale up your popularity to new articles.

Start by typing your keyphrase into Google, so an example, “learning and development, write for us” This will show you a list of pages in Google that include “write for us” so you can see what the website guidelines are if you want to become a regular contributor.

Create a list of websites that you would like to be associated with, and create a personalised email to send to each editor. Make sure to keep the email short, to the point, and give an example of what you have written previously. This will help increase your chance of a reply.

Conclusion

I have listed above five steps that you can do yourself to start bringing in targeted traffic to your website. If you really want to get more of your ideal clients, then following these steps is a step in the right direction.

Any of my LinkedIn connections who want me to explain these steps in more detail are welcome to send me a private message. And if your not a connection, then you can add me here.