It’s August and that means it’s Indy 500 time! Trust us, as Hoosiers, that sounds weird to us, too. But, what’s not weird to us is the consistent jostling to get to the head of the pack, putting yourself in the perfect position to strike when the time is right and capitalizing on your ranking to beat the competition. Wait… did you think we were talking about the race? Obviously, we’re talking about search engine optimization!
The high-speed world of the internet is like the Indy 500. Your website is your Indy car and SEO represents your crew, team and everything else behind the scenes. Taking the checkered flag depends on the ability of your driver, pit crew, your spotter, mechanics and heck, even a little luck from the weather. The same thing applies to your website’s SEO success: it takes a multifaceted approach to ensure everything works behind the scenes to put your site in a great position to win the attention of your target audience. At BlueSky, we know what it takes to build a website that beats the competition and develop a digital strategy that puts your company in pole position.
Start Your Engines!
When a person pulls up a search engine, that marks the beginning of the race. But, instead of 33 of the top performing race teams, you are at the starting line with nearly every website on the internet. The number of opponents gets winnowed down as the search term gets entered. And, as soon as the query is submitted, the green flag is waved and everyone competing for that search term slams on the gas!
Once the pedal hits the metal, the experience of the driver and the mechanics of the car are the most important things to determine the outcome. With SEO, experience is your site’s depth of searchable content, history of relevance, and possibly years of proving success to the goals of the search engine.
- Understanding Search Intent
What does the user want? This is where keywords are important, including long-tail keywords. - Providing Relevant Content
Is the content meaningful and how well does it answer the query? The better a user interacts with your site, the better the signal back to Google. - Optimizing User Experience
Does the landing page meet the users’ expectations and does it provide a good user experience? The user cares, and so does Google.
SEO and Marketing Content
The way to improve your position in the rankings and overtake the competition in this race for customer attention is to provide relevant information that solves problems or educates the reader. The more the search engine realizes you’re making a relevant connection for the user, the better position it will place your website on the search engine results page.
When creating a strategy to win the race for consumer attention, a great starting point is to study your competition. Enter your key search term(s) into a search engine and see who ranks on page one of the results page. Analyze how their content is relevant to the search term. What do they offer? Does their site answer the user’s potential question? How relevant is their content to the search term? Now, evaluate your content with the same questions. According to Ashley Segura, “Content marketing and SEO are natural complements to each other. They both fuel each other and act as the necessary gears of any successful digital marketing campaign.” Read more on SEO and Content Marketing on SEMRush blog.
Now, we know you run the race to get the top spot (so do we!), but we also know that it’s not only the winning driver who takes home prize money. Your site can help your company achieve business goals and increase revenue even as it climbs in the SERP rankings. The more you understand about how SEO works, the more prepared you are to create relevant web content for your audience which is a value to your customer all unto itself.
Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital and Subscribers, and a well-known web influencer says “Clearly, content marketing is only going to be successful if it has SEO features. Look at it this way: Your content is going nowhere unless people search and find. In order to make it found, you need SEO. Bring these two together. Alone, they are impotent. Together, they are dynamite.” We couldn’t agree more.
Imagine BlueSky, an expert in commerce, running the show for your company in this race for consumer eyeballs. We can be the mechanic who builds your website, your pit crew who maintains the site’s maximum output, your crew chief to develop a winning strategy, the spotter who tells you how to position your content among your competitors and the driver who makes the whole operation go fast!
The Indy 500 is the largest single-day sporting event in the entire world. The stakes are high for the race just like they are high for your business. If you’re ready to kiss the bricks like the Indy 500 winner, contact us so we can get started on a site evaluation!
