With a good SEO strategy, you kill two birds with one stone. Getting to the top of Google and building a good relationship with your customer. I assume you want this too. What I’m about to tell you may come as a surprise….
Getting higher in Google and building a good relationship with your customers are not far apart.
You don’t have to take my word for it. This article now ranks on 250 keywords and ranks 1st on the keyword “SEO strategy. I’m going to explain to you exactly why and how you will do the same for your business
Later in the article, I also take you through a video analysis of how we achieved 100% growth for one of our clients using this SEO strategy. And no, not once 3 years in a row!
The search engine optimization (SEO) tips I give you in this article form a roadmap that will get you higher in Google while working on a good relationship with your customer. In 7 steps I will show you how to:
- SEO should be employed for your product.
- Create content that resonates with your target audience.
- Optimizing your website for maximum findability
- Your content spread across the Internet.
- Rank better with your target audience and within Google.
Whatever you are selling, adding value to your target audience should be paramount. When you keep this in mind, you take a good first step toward a strong relationship with Google and your target audience.
Maybe that sounds a little vague now. But believe me, by the end of this roadmap, it will all be clear to you. So promise me one thing. Make sure you add value to your target audience before you move on to selling.
Are you ready to turn your content into killer content?
Step 1: Keep your search engine strategy simple. Pick a niche and make this your specialty
Making choices is one of the hardest things there is. Because if you choose one, you have to drop the other. This seems quite simple, but it is a difficult task for most people.
We are afraid to drop something because “we can get good at that too.” We call this “loss aversion.
It’s a common mistake in online marketing. You only have two or four hands available for your marketing activities and yet you want to be found on many different topics. But what would you prefer? To be found on 100 keywords within 10 topics or on 10,000 within one topic?
If you don’t make choices, the quality of your content will never get better than mediocre, and neither Google nor your target audience is waiting for that. Meanwhile, this leads to irritation among you and your colleagues. You work hard, but the results don’t materialize.
Therefore, choose one topic, focus on it and make it your specialty. By focusing on one topic, you maintain an overview. It becomes easier to write high-quality content and get measurable results.
You are going to create as much content as you can around this topic. Use pillars and clusters for this. A pillar is a main topic and a cluster is a sub-topic. For Dock Online, the niche is SEO. The pillars are technology, content and authority. Under these pillars fit different clusters such as: website speed, on-page seo and link building.
Over time, you will see that both Google and your target audience will begin to see you as an authority within your field. But more on that later.
Which specialty to choose depends on three things:
- What do you and your colleagues know the most about?
- Which topic is closest to your paid product?
- How fierce is the competition within this specialty?
It writes a lot easier if you have a lot of knowledge on the subject. Therefore, choose a topic that you and your colleagues know a lot about.
In addition, make sure the content you write is interesting to potential buyers of your paid product. In the end, you want to be rewarded for your efforts as well.
In addition, look closely at how intense the competition is within that area. The more other specialists are in that market, the harder it is to “add value.
If you want more information about choosing your specialization, sign up for my free SEO course after reading this post.
Become the best version of yourself
“Starting today, you are going to establish yourself as the most trusted advisor to your (potential) clients in the area of your specialty.”
Okay fair is fair, I didn’t come up with that statement all by myself. It’s part of Jay Abraham’s strategy of preeminence. His strategy goes much further, but more on that later (maybe).
Make sure you are clear to yourself what you want to achieve in the relationship with your customers. Do you see them as customers or do you see them as relationships?
After all, how you see your customers greatly affects how they see you, and that’s what it’s all about. We’re going to make sure you’re not just a supplier of a product, but a trusted advisor. This customer relationship has a much higher level of trust, intimacy, loyalty and respect.
The best part of all? You become an authority.
Exactly how and why you want to become an authority I’ll tell you later.
Specialist at Google
Okay, let’s take another step back.
This article is about making strides with SEO and now I’m talking about building optimal customer relationships within a specialty. What does that have to do with SEO?
Everything…
When your website is filled with content around one specialization, you not only become a specialist with your target audience, but also with Google.
With a specialization, you can go much deeper. This way you connect with the broader search behavior of your target audience. I’ll tell you more about this search behavior later, so don’t be afraid if it’s not clear by now.
The main message for now: choosing a specialization is going to get you much better Google search results. In addition, you will more easily build a qualitative relationship with your target audience, in which they are going to see you as an expert in your field.
Step 2: Create SEO content. Answer questions from your target audience
After you’ve chosen a specialty, it’s time to create content on your website. It’s not a big deal if you haven’t chosen a specialty yet, just keep in mind that you should.
As I mentioned in step one, you want to build a quality relationship with your target audience. With every (product) page you create, blog you write or video you shoot, you need to ask yourself the following:
“What issues is my target audience facing and how can I best answer them.”
As you can see, I highlighted the text “as best as possible. The more added value you provide, the better.
Let me explain this further using a roadmap:
- Do keyword research. Find connection to the search behavior of your target audience
- Write killer content. Answer your target audience’s questions in the best possible way
- Page Optimization. Let Google know what questions you’ve answered
Perform keyword research. Choosing the right keywords
Good keyword research is essential for a successful SEO campaign. You can use a free tool like the keyword planner from Google. But I recommend using a paid service like Semrush. Their keyword magic tool is so much better.
Yes you have to pay for it, but that’s what your website is worth. Right?
A monster blog can consist of as many as 10 sub-topics. So you can rank for as many as 1,000 short and long-tail keywords with one blog.
Short tail and long tail keywords
Shorttail searches are short searches of usually 1, 2 or 3 words with high search intensity. Searches tend to be broad and competition high.
Long-tail searches are longer and more specific keywords. 70% of all search traffic consists of so-called long tail searches.
Some examples:
| Shorttail | Longtail |
| Search engine optimization | How do I get to the top of google |
| SEO tips | What are the best SEO tips |
| Optimize website | How to improve my website speed |
| link building | How important is link building? |
This is where many companies go wrong….
They pick some popular short-tail keywords with lots of competition and then wonder why they can’t manage to get into the top 10 quickly. I’ll explain it to you using an example.
Let’s choose a competitive market for this example. Suppose you have an online platform for real estate agents nationwide.
You obviously want people buying houses to find a suitable real estate agent through you. That’s why you optimize a new page for the keyword “buy house. There are 18,000 people searching for this keyword every month. What a gold mine!
Right? Yes and no. Especially if you are just starting out and have not yet built a big name for yourself, it is very difficult to rank for such popular broad searches.
Subsequently, failure to achieve a top 10 score only causes disappointment and frustration. Fortunately, there is a solution! Choose a specialization (there it is again).
Suppose you choose to initially target the platform to “first-time home buyers.
Think about what questions these buyers are sitting with and look for (long-tail) searches where there is less competition. Such as:
- Buying a house what to look out for
- Home purchase checklist
- What’s involved when you buy a house
- What to look out for when buying a house
- Cost of buying home (shorttail, but little competition)
These keywords are all in the same direction. And now comes the very best part … You can start scoring on multiple keywords at the same time. How? By writing so-called “killer content.
Killer content writing for your seo strategy
With “killer content,” you answer your target audience’s search question in the best way possible. Let’s stay with the real estate agent comparison site example.
We will create a checklist on the topic of “what to look for when buying a house.
(Checklists, top 10s and tips always do well.)
What many companies will now do is write a short 400-word article, optimize the page for one of the keywords and then wait for the visitors to pour in.
But tell me, how much value does that add?
You will probably rank mediocre with it within Google rankings. But more importantly, poorly with your visitors. The visitor who comes to your website will not be impressed by your content, much less see you as an authority. If your content is mediocre, why should the visitor think your paid product is any good?
What I often get as feedback: ‘aren’t you afraid that I will then give away too much value for free’?
The answer is “No. Two reasons:
1: People don’t know you now. If you don’t write the content, they won’t get in touch with you and won’t become a customer anyway. Right?
2: By providing value you show that you have knowledge and are willing to help the customer even if there is no money in return. If they want to get help they still do and then you get to guess from whom!
If you want to write a good piece, it is important to choose a main topic and then look at what aspects you can all cover.
See what’s already out there online, use this as inspiration and expand on it with all your own knowledge. Make a checklist of topics that will really help your visitors, go in depth and check all aspects that are relevant to the reader.
You now get an article that covers many different aspects of the topic. It doesn’t matter how long the article is, as long as it answers the question as best it can.
Because you cover many different sub-topics around one topic, chances are you will rank well on multiple keywords. In addition, you show your visitor that you know a lot about this topic. This increases the chances that this visitor will later want to purchase your paid product.
How to check if you are making progress in Google rankings I will come back to that later. Now first, back to written content.
Page optimization. Let Google know what you’re writing about.
You’ve written content about questions that resonate with your target audience. Now it’s time to let Google know what you’ve written about.
You write content for your target audience and not for Google, but it is important to let Google know what you are writing about as much as possible.
I have created a cheat sheet that you can use to optimize your pages. In the image below, I’ve provided an example of the key elements you can optimize on your page.
Below the image, you can download the cheat sheet for free, including additional explanations on optimizing your content pages.
Free SEO Cheat Sheet
By optimizing your pages, you help give Google context around the content you offer on your website. Especially visual content such as images, illustrations and videos are important to further describe because otherwise Google won’t know what it’s about.
For now, the most important thing is to get the right mindset to build the best relationship with Google and your target audience. If you would like a step-by-step tutorial on how to optimize your pages, I recommend signing up for my free SEO course. In it I will show you in a handy tutorial video how to get the most out of your content.
Results of Step 2:
Step 3: Consider the consideration stage of your target audience
Remember what the main objective of your content was? Exactly, delivering value.
Always make sure that you deliver enough value that matches the needs of your target audience before you try to move on to sales. This is where 95% of entrepreneurs go wrong online.
They try to sell products or services without considering the four consideration stages of their target audience’s customer journey.
To better understand your visitors, we are going to divide them into four groups. See, think, do, stay. Each group describes a different stage of consideration of your target audience.
Seeing: this phase has the largest target audience. This includes all potential buyers of your product. They do not know your product or show interest yet.
Thinking: these are all the people who show interest in your product.
Do: This phase includes all people who actively show interest in your product and also want to proceed to purchase at this time.
Stay: these are all the people in your target audience who have already purchased a product once.
That’s all you need to know at this point, and you certainly don’t need to know them by heart.
So why do I mention them anyway? I would like you to become aware of the fact that not all your website visitors are the same.
The killer content I described in the previous chapter addresses an issue of your target audience. If your reader came to your website through Google, chances are he or she does not yet know you. You haven’t yet established a relationship with this person.
This visitor would like you to answer his questions so well. So how irritating is it when you immediately proceed to sell?
Check this out for yourself. How often do you open a web page and immediately get bombarded to death with texts like “buy now,” “order today,” or “reserve immediately” even before you know if this company suits you. Irritating right?
I’m not going to tell you to stop using these texts. But wait for the right moment and give the visitors who do not want to proceed to purchase yet other options.
By answering your target audience’s questions to the best of your ability, you have already begun to deliver value. Now it’s a matter of connecting to your visitor’s further needs.
Connecting to the needs of your target audience
Let’s take a website for fitness items and sportswear as an example.
You just wrote an article “lose weight without a gym in 30 days”.
This article has told you from A to Z how a person can get started at home and lose weight without taking one step into a gym.
For people who want to get started right away, you have put together a starter kit with useful products that they can buy now for €60.
Top!
But what if I’m not ready for that yet?
What if I don’t feel the need for a fit body enough yet?
What if I don’t have enough confidence in your company yet?
If you then keep bothering me with pop-ups and texts like “buy now” it only causes irritation.
I leave your website without buying anything and don’t come back.
Here’s what you need to do to avoid that
Be sure to incorporate links to other relevant pages on your website such as “the benefits of a fit body,” for example. This allows people to read up further and get to know your company better. In addition, these types of links are good for internal link building, I’ll tell more about this in step 5.
I’m not going to tell you to stop using these texts. But wait for the right moment and give the visitors who do not want to proceed to purchase yet other options.
By answering your target audience’s questions to the best of your ability, you have already begun to deliver value. Now it’s a matter of connecting to your visitor’s further needs.
But also give other options such as:
- Challenge your friends via social media. Who will get fitter in 30 days.
- Follow us on Facebook and get a new tip for a fit body every day.
- Use our free fit app and track how healthy you live for free.
So, as you can see, there are plenty of alternatives to “buy now” and “order immediately,” so make smart use of them.
Furthermore, I won’t go too deep into sales techniques, that’s fodder for another time. Now if you are interested in this, feel free to send us a message. We’d love to hear from you!
For now: always keep your target audience’s perception and consideration stage in mind when creating content.
Measuring is knowing and prevents frustration
A great added benefit of offering different options such as downloadable documents, internal links and buttons to share, for example, is that you can avoid a lot of frustration.
“Frustration?” I hear you thinking.
Let me explain to you…
If on the “lose weight in 30 days” page you only used a “buy now” button and no one buys your starter kit, then your page has been useless.
Then SEO only costs time and money. Right?
Well, that’s not always necessary…
Suppose you had 150 visitors on this page and 0 people bought the product. Then without small goals (micro conversions) you can’t do much else with that. If you also give these people other options, 50 people might have downloaded your app, 50 people challenged their friends and another 50 people started following you on Instagram.
With this, there is an opportunity to build the relationship with these people and eventually get them to make a purchase. Your message is successful without having sold a single product immediately.
Results of Step 3:
Step 4: Optimize the user experience on your website
You now know what you want to write about, what content to create and how to keep your website visitors close to you. But what about the user experience of your Web site?
Your website is the foundation for all content. If the user experience here is not good you will quickly lose visitors and your Google ranking goes down.
Time to take a closer look at this user experience. We won’t go too deep into this, the purpose of this section is to see how you improve and optimize the user experience.
Ask yourself the following about your website:
- Is my content easily accessible?
- Is my content easy to read?
- Is my content easily navigable?
When you do this for every page, your website becomes more user-friendly.
Tip: Ask visitors for feedback. If you don’t have many visitors yet, ask friends or colleagues to rate your website on the above points.
Is my content easily accessible?
The answer to this question affects your findability within Google, as well as your visitors’ user experience.
Personally, I hate slow websites, I am certainly not the only one in this. A slow website is a major frustration of many website visitors. They quickly drop out when a website loads too slowly, for this reason Google does not like to send
people to slow websites.
Slow websites will therefore have much more difficulty in rising in the rankings. That’s a shame, often a slow website can be made faster with just a few minor adjustments!
In 2021, Google made website speed even more important with the Core Web Vitals update.
A 4 MB picture may load quickly on your computer, but it is a disaster for your website. Therefore, always try to reduce and optimize your images and graphics for the Internet. A good (free) tool you can use for this is Riot.
In addition, you see that many slow pages are full of sliders, animations and other moving elements. These types of elements often require javascript which makes your website unnecessarily slow. It may look nice, but if it gets in the way of the user experience it’s better to leave it out
A slow website can have several causes, but often it comes from using large images, videos and adding heavy or bad code (plugins or themes).
How is your Web site really doing? Google has a handy tool called lighthouse that allows you to test how satisfied Google is with your website and what improvements you can make.
Don’t stare blindly at some of the improvements, however. It can take a lot of time and money to go from 83 to 95 without much improvement in page speed. Above all, test how your website reacts and how your visitors behave.
Mobile first indexing…
You want your content to be good and easy for your visitors to read anytime, anywhere.
Depending on the market you are in, 30% to 90% of visitors will visit your website via their cell phones. This is why Google has switched to mobile first indexing. The mobile site has thus become a major influence on your indexing within Google.
Therefore, make sure your website loads quickly and looks good on all devices, from desktop to mobile.
Is my content easy to read?
You want your content to be good and easy for your visitors to read anytime, anywhere.
Depending on the market you are in, 30% to 90% of visitors will visit your website via their cell phones.
Therefore, it is important that your website looks good on all devices, from desktop to mobile.
Many websites today are already responsive. That means your website structure automatically adjusts to the size of the screen being used.
Unfortunately, many people then just forget to check their newly created pages before publishing. Just because a page adapts to the size of the screen does not mean that the content looks good right away.
You often see that images don’t look right or elements are not legible. The best way to see if your website is mobile-friendly? Grab your phone and go to your website! So don’t forget to do this whenever you publish a new page.
Does it look good on all screens? Then you can be sure that the user experience is fine on all screens. If you want to know if Google considers your website mobile-friendly, you can use this test.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, it comes at the expense of the user experience of visitors visiting your website via mobile devices. This causes visitors to drop out. This at the expense of your Google ranking and your chance to build a relationship with your visitors.
Is my content easily navigable
It is important that your website structure is well put together. It should be clear to your visitor and to Google what content they can find on your website.
Create a logical site structure for yourself. This helps you put content that belongs together together. This way you make it easier for the user (and Google) to navigate through your website, in addition to preventing duplicate content.
Don’t offer the exact same content in multiple places. This may seem convenient. After all, that way you can be sure that your visitors are going to come across your most important content. But it only causes problems. You create duplicate content.
This is not nice for your visitor’s user experience. In addition, Google gives minus points for offering the same content in multiple places.
Instead of duplicate content, make sure you connect your pages properly. This way you make sure that visitors come across your most important content as well as keeping Google happy.
Pointing to other (your own) pages is what we call internal link building. You’ll read more about this in the next chapter.
Results of Step 4:
Step 5: Become an authority with your target audience and with Google
In the beginning of this article, I mentioned that you want to become an authority within your field. Both with your (potential) client and with Google. But how do you become an authority in the eyes of Google?
From day one, Google has cared how others think about your Web site. What is your reputation. Are other Web sites talking about your Web site? Then you are building a positive reputation. In doing so, they used to focus on quantity, but are getting better at paying attention to quality.
To gain authority in the eyes of Google, you must become “popular,” get others to refer to you. Let’s take the example of the “lose weight without a gym” blog for a moment.
Every page that links to the “lose weight without a gym” page counts as one link. A link from an external website is called a backlink.
The more of these links point to the page, the better your reputation. It used to be that it didn’t matter exactly where this link came from. Nowadays that is different, qualitative links count much more heavily than non-qualitative links.
For example, you’ll score more points if a popular blogger with lots of visitors recommends your “Lose weight in 30 days challenge” in one of his or her blogs, than if you have your challenge listed on a home page that has 1,000 other links to weight loss tips.
Makes sense right?
Getting lots of quality backlinks can sometimes be quite difficult and time-consuming. Some tips:
- Ask others to share your content.
- Write a guest blog on someone else’s website and reference one of your own.
- Ask vendors if they want to link to your pages.
- Write press releases and send them to editors.
Don’t buy links if you don’t know what you’re doing. Bad links do more harm than good.
Internal links
Internal links are references in your content to pages within your own Web site. For example, you can link from the “lose weight in 30 days” challenge to “eating tips” and “exercise tips. Think of it as an internal recommendation.
A good internal link profile is very important for Google and your user. A good internal linking strategy shows that people can find all the information on your website about that topic.
By directing your visitors to other interesting content within your page, you increase your value to these visitors.
In addition, you can show Google what the most important pages are within your website. If there are more links running to one particular page, that page must be important right? Exactly, so that’s how Google thinks.
Results of Step 5:
Step 6: Analyze your progress and ask for feedback
Working on SEO and your client relationship takes time. Therefore, it is good to check regularly to see if you are on the right track.
What should you pay attention to?
It is important not to do too much at once.
As you have read, there is quite a bit involved in optimizing your content. If you want to improve all your pages at once, it’s going to take too long, which in turn creates frustration.
Pick a few pages with associated keywords that are important to your business and start analyzing them.
Make sure your pages, text and images are optimized.
Is your website created in WordPress, then you can use Yoast or Rankmath (sort of like Yoast on steroids) to check that the basics of your page are set up properly. You can also keep a list yourself of the components on which you want to optimize a page and then go through this list.
To analyze and optimize the page, it is important that you use the right tools. These tools often cost money, but it saves time and provides better insights.
Dok Online has developed a dashboard containing all the important data that keeps track of the progress of our clients’ SEO campaigns. And they can also look into it themselves. This gives a better overview of the results.
Then you can look in Google Search console to see how your page is performing. For example, Search Console shows for each keyword how many impressions your page has had, how many people have clicked to your website and what position you are in.
It is important to take follow-up steps based on this data as well. Start looking for the bottlenecks that are hindering your performance. For example, a page may show up frequently in search results, but people don’t click through to your website much. Then see if your title tag and meta description are appealing and different from those of your competitors.
If you haven’t moved up in position in the last month, see if you can still get quality backlinks by writing a guest blog, for example. This way you make sure you keep making (small) steps and progress every time.
Ask for feedback
It’s important to see if you’re making progress in Google rankings. But it’s even more important to know what your visitors think about you.
If you have a search function on your website, check what your target audience searches for within your website. That way you can see what content your visitors can’t find. If you do have this content, you need to improve internal findability. If you don’t have this content, it’s a good idea to start writing about it.
Are they happy with your content, are they still missing things and what else can you help them with? Who knows better what your target audience wants than your visitors themselves? There are several ways to get feedback. Ask under your blog posts if there are any other topics people would like to know more about.
Use a feedback tool like Hotjar. This tool has a free version and allows you to ask for feedback on every page of your website. This way you get to know your target audience and their needs better and better.
Results of Step 6:
Step 7: Don’t give up and keep working on the relationship
Give all the effort you put into SEO a chance to do their job. Don’t give up too quickly if immediate results are not forthcoming.
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, in their book inboundmarketing a great example. Think of SEO as playing the guitar. At first you struggle to move your fingers across the strings so it seems to take forever to play a simple tune.
But once you get the basics under control, you’ll find that making follow-up steps go a lot smoother. That’s how it works with SEO, too.
Don’t give up too soon even though at first it may seem like nothing is happening. In a few months, all your efforts will pay off handsomely.
If you are finally in the1st position for your coveted search, make sure you stay there.
If you stop paying attention to it, two months later you are back at number 4.
I am not telling you this to discourage you, I am telling you this to indicate that SEO is an ongoing process.
The more competitive the keyword, the more you need to keep working on it.
Keep writing new content on the same topic. For example, today I did my best to tell you how to work on the relationship between your content, Google and your audience.
But there are still a lot of topics I can write about before my website is a reference work on SEO. For example, this article already contains 10 stepping stones for other in-depth articles.
Stay on top of your current content. It’s often easier to boost a blog you wrote a year ago than to start all over again on a new piece of content.
In addition, keep working on your link profile. Make sure other websites recognize you as a specialist in your field. The more websites begin to see Dok Online as a specialist in SEO, the sooner that reference is a reality.
The moral of the story
Deliver value first, then sell…
Perhaps everything I have just told you is a bit overwhelming.
And now you may be thinking “Where do I start?”
First, you don’t have to do everything at once. Work one step at a time.
The main purpose of this article is to change your mindset toward SEO and building a relationship with your audience and Google.
I made a video showing you what a successful SEO strategy can look like.
Do it yourself or outsource?
Did you find this post interesting and want to actively get started and work out your SEO strategy? Then request a no-obligation quick scan.
We show you where the opportunities are for you and provide clear insights into the possibilities. Included in our quick scan is:
- Basic keywords and competition research
- Analysis of existing content
- Clear explanation video including telephone consultation
Want our help with your SEO strategy right away? Ask us about our SEO strategy sprint!
