Aligning SEO With Buyer Journey:
When it comes to creating a sustainable and successful SEO campaign for your business website, nothing is more important than the buyer.
Marketers need to think beyond keywords, searches, and rankings and focus only on the audience- and the rest will happen organically. The truth is that all customers take a journey while purchasing online and search engines are a part of this journey. If you are able to align your SEO strategies with this journey, you can expect them to be successful.
At the same time, the audience matters the most to Google and any website that aspires to deliver excellence in their experience will get favorable rankings. So everything boils down to aligning SEO with the buyer journey.
But this is easier said than done because there are several visible and hidden aspects you need to understand. Let us explain to them in detail.
Also Read: Best SEO Affiliate Programs
Comprehending buyer journey
First things first, you need to understand what a buyer’s journey is. Simply speaking, it is the path that a person takes while purchasing a product or service. The path may be short (such as accessing an online marketplace and doing holiday shopping in just 30 minutes) or long (such as spending two months researching a product, comparing it with alternatives, and then buying it).
It depends on several factors, such as the type and value of the product or service, purchase channel, and buyer’s mindset. Each step that the customer takes during this journey is vital and you need to identify bottlenecks to understand the reasons behind incomplete journeys.
One thing to remember here is that each buyer’s journey may be different because every person is unique and has their own way of searching for products and completing purchases.
Understanding alignment
Once you know what the buyer journey is all about, you need to understand how you need to align your SEO campaigns with it.
Alignment is all about ensuring that the content, topics, and keywords you optimize your website for are the same as what matters to your target audience in the particular stage of their buying journey. In short, you have to focus on providing the audience what they might be looking for, which is possible only if you are able to match their search intent.
It enables a business to reach the right audience with the right content, at the right place and the right time. After all, you wouldn’t just want to bring a lot of visitors to your site; rather you would want to drive the right personas- the people who are genuinely interested in your offering and are most likely to buy them.
Identifying buyer personas
Before aligning your SEO initiative to match the buyer’s journey, you have to identify the buyer personas that you may come across. Essentially, a buyer persona is the profile of your ideal prospect- the potential customer. It is created on the basis of aspects such as demographics, objectives, pain points, preferences, and expectations.
Every business can have multiple buyer personas and it is feasible to develop at least a few before you take the next steps for tailoring your strategies to match the individual personas. The idea is to reach out and engage with as many of the target customers as you possibly can- with a personalized approach that compels them to complete the transaction.
Mapping content to the buyer’s journey
Considering that content is the mainstay of SEO, you need to map it to the buyer’s journey. This is done by taking individual content pieces and identifying the buyer persona and stage in the journey it applies to. You need to do it for blog posts and website product and service pages to ensure that you have appropriate search queries for the entire content resources.
After compiling a list of your content and mapping them to the appropriate stage and persona, you can further analyze it to identify the pieces that you are missing. This will help you create a content plan so that you can fill these gaps and have every step of the journey covered.
Identifying keywords possibilities
Apart from content, keywords are the other critical component of SEO that you cannot ignore. Identification of the right keywords is critical when it comes to achieving the perfect harmony between your SEO strategy and the buyer journey.
The internet marketing specialists at Falcondigitalmarketing.com recommend using keyword ranking tools to nail the existing ranked keywords. Further, you need to do extensive research and use your intuition to explore new keyword possibilities as well. A mix of both will ensure that you have all the fronts covered.
Having the keywords that match the search intent of the customers can elevate your website automatically and drive results for your website in terms of ranking and traffic.Â
Implementing keywords properly
After identifying the target keywords that are most likely to be searched by your buyer personas at any stage of their journey, you need to implement them on the site. Simply speaking, you need to position them correctly while adhering to the SEO parameters of keyword optimization.
Ideally, the target words are to be included in the H1 tags or headlines, page titles images alt text, and throughout the copy of the page. Further, you will need to have them across the website- on the product or service pages, persona-based pages, and landing pages for special offers and specific purposes.
Moreover, you can include keywords for each persona and from each stage of the funnel to the blog posts as well. Proper implementation of keywords can drive success for your SEO plan by pushing your content in search queries.
Remember that one size does not fit all when it comes to creating buyer personas and understanding their individual journeys. What you really need is a thorough understanding of the kind of people who will be searching, what they will be looking for, and when they will be searching before you implement your SEO plan.
Coming up with content that satisfies their needs at each stage is the secret to taking them to the subsequent stages until they reach the last one and close the sale successfully.
