The entire point of your website is to attract customers to your business, right? Unfortunately, you can’t simply put your site online and expect to have customers. You have to meet the needs of the search engines too or potential clients may never find your site. How can you juggle the needs of your customers along with the needs of search engines? It’s actually easier than you think.Put the needs of your customers first. The most important thing to remember is that your customers have to come first. Not everyone is going to discover your site with the help of a search engine, and those that do will be looking for solid content. If it reads like keyword bait, it might as well be. Customers are savvier than ever about search engine marketing, and they want to feel like you’re talking to them, not Google. If ever there’s a choice to be made about customers vs. search engines, go with customers every time.
Think in keywords. You want people on your site. It’s the entire point of having a site. The term “keywords” doesn’t have to come with a negative connotation. Instead, you can simply think about what words your customers use to search for your services and products, then mention those terms a few times in appropriate places. The key here is to use them naturally, and a good copywriter can help work them seamlessly into the text.
Break the copy up. Studies suggest people read differently online than they do offline. They like chunks of information. Bullets, sub heads, lists, bold print, clear sections – all of these should fit into your copy. Interestingly enough, that makes it easier for the search engines to tell exactly what your page is about too.
Link to other parts of your site. People love links. They like to click on them, open them in new tabs, and move to the next logical part of your site. Search engines love sites that are easy to navigate.Carefully, clearly link the various parts of your site together, and you’ll get better feedback from your customers and clearer search engine rankings.
The needs of the search engine and the needs of your customers don’t have to be quite so diverse. Search engines are continually refining algorithms to help meet the needs of searchers instead of those being searched, so SEO in the future could easily reflect the needs of customers and search engines alike.