Saturday, July 22, 2017

The Iterative Nature of SEO Development

Many companies launch their digital presence with a company webpage, and early on, perhaps companies built their webpages to get basic information and functionality to work. As time went on, the value to search engine optimization came more to the forefront. So perhaps the priority for companies in developing their websites is something like: 1. Functionality 2. SEO 3. Customer Experience.

When SEO first became mainstream there were lots of tips you could follow to get your page to rank higher - using bold fonts, high keyword density, lots of links to and from reputable sites etc... But designing a website through an SEO lens will yield a different result than if you design a website strictly from a customer experience lens; and the two lenses can be at odds with one another.

This article proposes an iterative process on how you can better align SEO and customer experience. 

The basic gist of this article is that companies typically design a website with a certain customer experience in mind. They make sure to fit in keywords to help rank their page based on what they think their customers may search for, and try to ensure the customer experience aligns with this. This article suggests SEO and customer experience is an iterative process and that companies should go back after their site has been running for a bit, and analyze the data in Google Search Console. Here, companies can see what words their site are actually ranking for and using that information to evaluate your existing customer experience.

"The page keywords and phrases serve as our inventory of the customer intents, and this allows us to perform an audit to identify the gaps in our experience."

The article goes on to tell the audience how to use keywords and customer intent to modify the content on the company's landing page, and to develop specific content to meet the appetite of the customers.

I think this article does a good job reminding us that maintaining a digital presence needs to be an active and ongoing process and that there are lots of ways to continue to refine and improve your webpage to meet your customer's evolving needs. It's also a good reminder that content is still king - building quality content to meet your customers' demands is still the best way to get noticed on the web.

Iterative Nature of SEO Development

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