“Know your audience”, “Speak their language” – We hear this everyday in marketing, but figuring out what actually makes your target audience tick is easier said than done.

Any mind readers available for hire?

Even if you are a mind reader, with the best marketing and the fanciest website in the world, you’ll still struggle to get the results you’re after if you don’t put the right SEO strategies in place to capture that audience.

Some digital agencies will tell you that they have the special secret to SEO success and that’s why they have to charge you top dollar for it. The real magic of SEO is that there’s no rabbit in the hat. No tricks.

This doesn’t stop many businesses from getting confused. They know what they want to do, but choose the wrong way to make it happen, losing sight of who they want to attract in the process.

The biggest mistakes are too common, and they go like this:

•         Treating SEO as a short-term game
•         Ranking for the wrong keywords
•         Not producing regular and relevant content

These don’t need to be categorised into an order of ‘Which Is Worst?’.

The crucial thing to remember is that taking a short-term approach to SEO is asking for trouble.

This is when you can fall into the trap of giving everything to get the most incredible results in your rankings from day one.

It’s not going to happen.

Why?

Because you have to do the hard work first. That’s by showing Google that you deserve to rank better.

How?

By having a trusted site that has the right keywords in the right places and is relevant.

There are still businesses out there who rank wonderfully well for a keyword or phrase that has nothing much to do with what they provide.

An example is Joe Blo the Electrician. He wants his SEO to bring him more clients and showcase why he is the best choice for anyone needing an electrician.

The point is, Joe can’t work right across the whole city so he can’t be there for just anyone. It makes no business sense to get calls from the other side of town because Joe can’t spend hours getting to and from every job with the travel time and cost on him. He is much better off targeting and ranking for his local area (a handful of suburbs).

Then there is the point of difference factor. Let’s say Joe is an expert in dealing with air-con units and solar panels which are a big earner for him.

Ranking for ‘air conditioner electrician’ and ‘solar electrician’ will help him no end. Suddenly, Joe is targeting the right audience in more ways than one. He is also able to provide his target audience with exactly what they are looking for.

A trap for businesses

One mistake that a business can avoid is falling for the idea that SEO efforts will bring immediate results. Good things take time and it’s important to know that SEO is a long-term strategy. That means building trust and being effective with how and where you rank.

You can waste a huge amount of time, money and effort by ranking for the wrong keywords, having a website that takes too long to load, doesn’t work on a mobile and has no regular or relevant content.

What would someone think if they found your website to be irrelevant to what they were looking for, hard to navigate and even out of date? Not one they would stay on for long or ever revisit.

Don’t be that kind of website.

Maybe you need an SEO health check? 

It pays to talk to the Mad Scientist team. We can help you perform to your best by taking a forensic look at what’s happening online for your business.

We’re here when you need us.

Actually you do need us, we’re reading your mind right now! Get in touch.