KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing visitor traffic to a website by ensuring that the website appears higher on a search result whenever a search is made by a user. Hence it is important for businesses to understand what the users are looking for and design the business website (manage content) to ensure that the users find what they were looking for.

To understand user searches better, let’s try to imagine a scenario wherein a user identifies a problem and wants to find a solution for it online. Let’s say the user is looking for bedsheets. Most users will start with the search “bedsheets melbourne” trying to find businesses that sell bedsheets in Melbourne.

(Information searches are much different and users try different command keywords for such searches. Some examples are “how to build a tent”, “can I vote at 17”)

This search will give the user a bunch of results through which the user will go through and try to find the one that best suits the user. If the user finds a solution to the search, the user clicks on the result. If the click yields no result for the user, the user goes back to the search result, change the keyword phrase to something more specific such as “quality bedsheets melbourne”.

This search behaviour helps Google understand which keywords are relevant to which websites and if a user goes back to the search result after clicking on your website and not finding the solution, your relevance rating is pulled down by Google. This was termed as pogo stick problem and Rand Fishkin explains pogo sticking in great lengths on the moz website. Once you are done reading all my blogs, you should definitely check out his pages.

A great example was explained by Brian Dean’s article on “how to get high quality backlinks”. Brian noticed that his article ranked first for keyword search “high quality backlinks” AND the search “how to get high”. The users who were looking for backlink information definitely stayed on his page, however the ones who were looking to get high found the article as uninteresting as water and hence went back to the search results immediately. This behaviour dragged the article down the result for the search “how to get high”.

The example shows how important it is for a website to offer the solutions it promises to offer via its content so that the users don’t hop off.

Another important user behaviour to be noted is the user’s inclination to click on the first 3 results of a search. It is a known fact that close to 60% of users only click on one of the first 3 results whenever a search is made.

Bottom line? Know your target audience! Give them what they want by designing the website on those needs. If you are a business looking for Melbourne SEO services, look up Traffic Radius and set up an appointment to get your website analysed and optimized!

If you are looking for a break from all the SEO reads, check out my personal blog at nitinkarunakaran.wordpress.com. I use it like Trump uses twitter so it’ll be total gibberish.