Let’s pretend you own a bakery specializing in gourmet pies. Because it’s crucial to your business, you make it your goal to win the “best apple pie” award at the annual pie competition in your home city.
You spend months experimenting with different combinations of spices, crusts, and frostings until you finally find what you believe to be the perfect pie recipe.
Excited by your efforts, you enter your pie into the competition. Soon after, the apple pie judge informs you that your pie doesn’t qualify for the contest because it doesn’t include real apples in the ingredients. Sure, you spent the last few months creating a delicious pie recipe, but it wasn’t a true apple pie Thus, you learned a painful but valuable lesson: you can’t win best “apple pie” without apples.
As silly as it may sound, many small businesses make similar mistakes with their SEO strategy. Many strategies include blogging, crafting clever page titles, and building a few backlinks. That said, their website simply does not include the right ingredients needed to win searches.
What are the main ingredients to search engine optimization (SEO)?
Two of the main ingredients for SEO are;
- Expert knowledge (details about your products and services)
- Searchable content (trending/seasonal + answers to what your intended audience is asking Google)
When these two ingredients work together correctly on your site, you’ll notice more customers chomping at the bit for a piece of that pie.
Since it’s November and Thanksgiving is right around the corner (along with its seasonal content), let’s continue to use the local bakery example, as bakeries usually get busy around this time of year. However, instead of entering a pie competition, we’re going to compete with other local bakeries for searches related to apple pies.
To compete for and win apple pie-related searches, we’ll need to gather our main ingredients.
Expert knowledge & searchable content
First, we must show that we are not only a bakery that makes delicious apple pies, but we have to prove ourselves to be apple pie experts. To do this, we need to include detailed, original, and differentiated content on our website.
Since we’re targeting apple pies, we should create a new section of our website dedicated to apple pies. If the bakery already has an apple pie page, great, but we should look to expand it into a complete section.
Remember – the goal here is to show that we are apple pie experts. We must include as much information as possible about apple pies.
The information we cover should be in our own words, and it should include:
- Origins
- Ingredients
- Style variations (Dutch, French, American, etc.)
- Nutrition facts
- Recipes
- Reviews/testimonials
- Etc.
The more details we include about apple pies, the better chance our bakery has at winning searches and hitting our goal, which is to be the place to get an apple pie for Thanksgiving.
Breaking your site up into multiple different sections
Now, we mentioned how this should be a section, and this means more than one page. Instead of having one long page of detailed information about apple pies, we should break this out into multiple pages (a complete section). For example, we can take the popular American apple pie style and give it its own page.
On the American apple pie page, we can dive into deeper details about American apple pies: origins of the American apple pie, famous/traditional recipes, mini apple pie baking instructions, nutrition facts, popularity ratings, fun videos, and more.
Also, be sure to take notice that the more detailed a site’s content gets, the more searchable content the business can start to build. For instance, the American apple pie page helps strengthen the apple pie page, plus we can also start ranking for searches that include “American apple pie,” rather than just “apple pie.”
What exactly is “searchable content?”
When we mention “searchable content,” we are referring to content that our intended audience is asking Google. Google has a tough job determining user’s intent. If someone searches “apple pie,” what are they looking for? You need to research information about apple pies, apple pie recipes/how to make apple pie, shop apple pies, etc. Building out a complete apple pie section will help your company look like experts and cover the different types of searches our audience might ask Google.
To cover the searchers intent, we should include our searchable content ingredient to our SEO strategy. People use search engines for many different purposes, but three of the main search types include:
- Informative searches: How many calories are in a Dutch apple pie?
- Transactional searches: Where to buy a homemade apple pie for Thanksgiving?
- Seasonal/trendy searches: Keto-friendly apple pies (informative + trending)
After you build out your apple pie section, pat yourself on the back and share the information with your pie-loving audience. In time, Google will take notice of your apple pie expertise and is likely to award your business website with better search rankings.
Call Compulse Integrated Marketing today!
There are many pieces you can add to your SEO strategy, but at least you now have the main ingredients to win searches. If you are interested in learning more about how different SEO strategies can win you searches that bring in new customers, call our team of experts today at 844-821-2154, or visit us on the web at https://compulse.com/.