SEO a Brief Overview of the Basics

Audience, Elevator pitch and Marketing message

Before you begin any SEO / Internet marketing campaign you must select your keywords / phrases. Sounds simple, so what do you need to do? Follow this process as a guide to getting your Keywords right and beat your Competition.

Remember getting high rankings on the search engines is all about knowing what your competitors are doing and then for you to do better!

Lets get stated, bfore you even consider looking for the right keywords you need to make sure that you know your organisation’s marketing message and marketing pitch (elevator pitch). If not correctly known, you may optimize the wrong content and keywords!

Audience

The first step in your SEO strategy should be to define your target audience – see our previous article – SEO Strategy – Define your Audience.

Elevator pitch

Can you define your marketing messages?

In 2 sentences, describe/sell the service/product that you are offering to potential customers.

An elevator pitch is often a single and key part of your marketing program. It should be both succinct and compelling. An effective elevator pitch could include:

  • A description of your offering and why it is needed (benefits)
  • An explanation to why you are the right supplier (key differentiators and skills)
  • And a hook to generate interest

Marketing message

Are your marketing messages clearly communicated on your website?

Your potential customers need to clearly get your marketing message(s) from your website. Your site (meta title, meta description, keywords and phrases, content, and so on) need to be consistent and support your elevator pitch.

Great, you now know your elevator pitch and marketing message. You can now start looking at the core terms that are relevant to the page or pages you want to optimise.

SEO | Where am I now?

You need to assess your landing pages and ensure that they meet the criteria for On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The key basic areas to assess are:

  • Domain Name
  • Document Title
  • Document Description
  • Document Keywords
  • External CSS References
  • Header Tags
  • Body Text
  • Images
  • Links and
  • Document Type Definition | HTML Code Check

A good SEO Tools package will give you an analysis summary for the appropriate landing pages and highlight the areas that need to be reviewed.

Ranking for each search phrase:

Where does your site rank now for your defined search words/ phrases?

Place all your keywords/ phrases into an appropriate set of SEO Tools. Get a ranking against each keyword/ phrase and store these for future comparisons. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools will have a tracking facility that will manage this for you.

SEO | Competitive Rankings

Now that you have identified the real competition; you need to get a base line. Run a ranking check for each search engine for all of your applicable search terms: your SEO keywords and phrases for competitive research.

You would typically check the rankings for the competition in Google, Bing and Yahoo, and maybe some engines which are used specifically in your country or industry.

See the CreatorSEO Process Guides for more information on what to do next…

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