I’m going to assume you read Part I last week, and I’m just going to jump right in here.
What’s Your Current Situation?
The first step toward implementing the psychology-based SEO that we talked about last week is figuring out where you are at the moment. How are your big-money keywords performing? Are you continuing to climb the rankings? What’s your current RoI? Bottom line? How long could you keep your current level of cashflow up if you had to?
Setting Goals
Now that you’ve got plenty of different statistics dancing around your head, it’s time to push them forward. What are your short-term business objectives? Is your SEO strategy helping you achieve those goals in the most direct manner? Remember, business goals need to be SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Actionable
- Realistic
- Timed
Developing A Strategy
Here’s where it all comes together. You have all of the information at your fingertips at this point — your customer psychology as given by keyword and on-page activity metrics and the narratives they built; your current business situation; your goals. To move forward, you need to create steps that will move you toward your goals while relying on the narratives and on the resources you currently have at your disposal.
In the vast majority of cases, this means developing one or two of your narrative groups in order to increase the profit they drive. For example, with the B&B example from last week, you might have
- 145 visitors per week looking for a cheap place to stay overnight as they drive from one coast to the other.
- 340 visitors per week that live in Cleveland and want to spend the night somewhere romantic, either for a special occasion or just to get away from the kids
- 370 visitors per week that are coming to Cleveland for some convention or other but don’t want to leave the day the convention ends.
The market segments to target are pretty clear: you want to develop a powerful romance-oriented landing page, and another landing page advertising all of the benefits that your B&B has to offer the weary post-convention traveler who needs one more night to recuperate before they fly home.
Developing Tactics
When it comes to the precise ways you can execute your strategy, there are a myriad of options — and, to be honest, at this point it largely comes down to what your SEO guy is comfortable doing well. The precise tactics — the ‘technical SEO’, as it were — are actually less important than the strategy when it comes to accomplishing your business goals. The critical facets are that your SEO guy gets involved early, that the company recognizes the interaction between SEO and customer psychology, and that you work together to get inside your customer’s heads and then put what they want most on the Internet for them to find.
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