According to Josh McCoy the lead strategist at Vizion Interactive, content and the overall user experience are the most important parts of any SEO campaign.
McCoy, who is also is a speaking contributor to ClickZ Live, Intergrated Marketing Summit and the Digital Summit Conference Series, identified the trio of factors in a recent blog post aimed at helping online marketers get the best out of their SEO efforts.
Content
Everyone knows that with increasingly clever semantic searches being used by the major tech companies, content is king. However, the organic search landscape within a specific industry segment will be crowded with frequently searched terms, so pitching the content to make it visible to target demographics is a tricky business.
McCoy suggests using tools such as SEMrush or Linkdex to see what type of keyword presence your competition uses and then to check out their top keywords by search volume that you do not rank for.
“For additional insight, use a tool such as BuzzSumo, which, for a given term, can show you similar content that has been created, be it blog posts, articles, infographics, interviews,” McCoy writes.
The experience
Usability is the key to optimising conversions and that is essentially the goal of most online marketing campaigns.
“I think a lot of us have moved away from keyword obsession, rightfully so, but are still stuck on bright shiny things that relate to digital strategy and tactics. Taking time to review what your site visitors are actually doing when on a website may prove more valuable than chasing new marketing methods,” McCoy explains.
Lucky Orange, Usertesting.com and Optimizely are tools that McCoy recommends to help provide clear pathways and calls to action to help your users.
Google Analytics is a free tool that even novice webmasters can use to great effect to gain important insights into how their online marketing is actually performing.
McCoy advises spending a few hours looking at the Behavior Flow section of Google Analytics to establish what your most popular landing pages are. By reviewing the bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit metrics, a lot can be learned.
