Just as you finally are get used to the terms SEO and SEM a “new” term comes along. Fairly enough, the term itself isn’t entirely that new (if you’ve already heard about it). Let’s get to know Online Audience Optimization. You already know that SEO for SEM is about optimizing your pages for search engines. OAO on the other hand, is about going beyond getting traffic. Traffic is great, but not all that great if you’re not drawing your ideal audience. Traffic is the goal, but should it be your only goal? ( Also see, “You’ll Have To Get More Social This Year To Improve Conversions”).
Know Your Audience
Many gurus have been harping on this for quite some time, but it seems like some people aren’t listening at all. Your audience is your reason why you are here. Your audience is whom you make your products for or provide your services to. Everything you do should start with knowing your audience. Your audience and not the search engine technology, dictates your products, services and actions.
Show Your Audience You Care
By knowing your audience, it should help enable you to understand and make them feel that you care about their needs, value their thoughts, and respect their opinions. If you are clear in expressing your goals to your audience and the benefits you are willing to provide to them (given that you are providing them a clear picture of what’s in it for them) then the audience you go after will feel positive about your intent behind your offers. This sums up to establishing a great connection between you and your potential clientele – a connection they can’t quite identify but it’s there, and it’s there for a very pleasant reason nonetheless.
Stop Focusing on Technology
Keywords and search terms do matter, it’s clear, but they should not be your only focus. Many online marketers easily forget about that in the race to the first page of results as based on search engine technology. This is why Google, in their quest to do their best job for their customers, come up with ways to return high quality relevant search results, resulting in constant updates and other changes that affect us marketers. As soon as you learn to play the game of the system, they change the algorithm. Stop worrying about the algorithm and focus instead on your clients, future clients, and their needs.
Invite Audience Participation
This can happen on social media and your website. When you study your metrics, look at the time spent on your website and the bounce rate. These are two important indicators that you’re not really speaking to your audience clearly enough. Encourage engagement to get them to stick around and not leave. Ask for their opinion, conduct a poll, start a discussion with a controversial blog post. Ask them what they think.
Let Go of Keyword Density
The fact is, other than the chance of being accused of keyword stuffing, trying to write a particular percentage of “keyword density” blogs, articles and other content should not be the focus of your content. You still want to make use of keywords within your titles, somewhere within your URLs and headers, but you really don’t need to worry about using keywords inside the text that much. Use them naturally and sparingly, and your audience will respond better. This isn’t to say that SEO is dead as some are saying. But, it is to say that it’s time to put our focus where it should have been all along and that is on the audience. Before we had search technology, marketing focused on studying the audience and their needs and to come up with advertising and marketing strategies that will appeal to that audience positively. SEO used in conjunction with the idea of taking the audience and their needs into account will go a lot farther than focusing on just SEO. Understanding The Idea Of In-Depth Content And The Effect It Has On Your SEO And Audience will also take your status and figure of authority to new heights.
