We quite often get asked to provide Search Engine Optimisation training for our clients, and that’s absolutely fine.
We can take you through the intricacies of running technical SEO on your website, taking advantage of some of the wonderful (sometimes slightly contradictory, sometimes free, sometimes horrendously expensive) tools out there.
What we don’t want is to leave you feeling slightly empty at the end of it, because you’ve got so much to do and the answer to every question tends to be… it depends.
SEO… it depends
There’s a good reason why it’s such an SEO catchphrase, and that’s of no help to the newly trained, emboldened and appointed SEO specialist for your business. Why? Because that’s not what you want to hear from them and we’d be doing both them and our clients a disservice if that’s where our offering stopped.
- Yes, there are some incredibly complex factors to consider if you are going to optimise absolutely
- Yes, if your code is blocking search engine robots, you aren’t going to rank organically
- Yes, organic traffic is down because there is so much sponsored (i.e. paid) and AI activity on the search results page for Google
- Yes, Google launch a core update every 2-3 months – November 2024’s came out the day before this blog was written and we’re all on tenterhooks to see what impact it’s going to have
But ultimately, SEO isn’t as complicated as everyone makes it out to be, it’s all about answering questions that your prospective audience is asking.
SEO Training 101 – know thy audience
If you are selling a product or a service then your salespeople are the ones you need to talk to first and foremost – they have direct experience of the questions that your potential clients ask and not just the successful ones, but those who didn’t convert.
Work on understanding those questions and developing a response to them in the language of those customers. In a way, someone new to the business who has been thrown into the role of generating content should be best at this, because they aren’t so immersed in the slow decay of acronyms that every business seems to fall prey to and want things explained in plain English (assuming that’s your language of choice).
Whilst your brand needs to be on-point, your campaigns sexy as hell and your photography and video polished, what your customers need is for you to understand their problems and be able to solve them without constantly glorifying yourself and belittling their experience.
Ultimately building your copy around these questions will give you a BS-free site and allows you to prioritise what is most important about your product or service for your customer – after all, they are the ones paying for it, so their needs come first.
Need a hand with that?
Well you’ve come to the right place, drop our Digital Director an email and he’ll come and sort you out with the SEO training you need, but done nicely and he’ll use a cat as a metaphor, honestly you’ll love it.
Also, this blog post headline conforms to Betteridge’s Law and that makes Darren very happy because he’s a word nerd.
