I have been surprised this semester with how similar search engine optimization is to sales. In sales class, we learned about pain and gain and discussed how to best convey our solutions to our potential clients. It is quite similar with SEO, except you have to “sell” your site to Google along with selling your products to customers. Though optimizing your website to help it get indexed/placed by Google may seem more tech-driven than traditional sales, it is still very important to make people your main priority. Not only does Google look for sites optimized for the web, but it also looks for content with authority to answer users’ questions, and even the “conversational” skills of your site.
In order to establish authority and a good “conversational flow” to your site, you need to find out your potential customers’ pain point. Doing a deep dive into that will help you formulate your site in a way that can answer their queries and provide some type of solution to their pain. This can also help with off-site optimization if you gain traction (linking). Furthermore, if you get positive reviews on your product/site, your authority will be greater.
Your main goal when optimizing your site should be to optimize it for people, not the machines that crawl it. Thinking directly about the pain points of your potential customers will help you unlock new skills for SEO. When you put people first, you become more likely to be ranked by Google, and more likely to help people, which should be your main goal anyway!
2 Responses
I noticed that too! Lots of what I learned in marketing applied to SEO as well! I mentioned that in my post too.
This is a really good post! It is really important to think not about Google and how you are supposed to make content that appeals only to the bots. The people that the content is geared to are more important. And the only way to make the content appeal to them is finding what their pain is and optimizing that for success