The standard way of doing SEO has always been to find the low hanging fruit – the most popular key phrases with the least amount of competition – and try placing your pages as high up on the results pages as possible.
This is a sound strategy, and there’s nothing essentially wrong about it, but it doesn’t always deliver the best results from a conversion perspective.
Even if you’re targeting buyer keywords, you might only convert a small percentage of the traffic coming in. Depending on the amount of money you’re investing in SEO, this may or may not be a worthwhile approach.
One of the things that can help you improve your ROI is user-centered SEO. In short, user-centered SEO is much like standard SEO, but with extra focus on the user’s experience when they’re going through the funnel you’ve prepared for them.
Step #1: Defining Personas
User-centered SEO begins with defining specific user personas that you want to cater to.
To start with, define the specific traits of your users and their needs. Each type of users will have different needs and different characteristics. Basing your next actions on the predictions done here will improve your chances of converting more visitors later on.
So just start by defining who those users are and what they could possibly need from you and the offer you’re presenting on your site.
Step #2: Defining Keywords
Use the personas you’ve created in the previous step and pick the keywords that those people are most likely to relate to.
The keywords don’t necessarily have to be the most popular ones or the least competitive, but they need to resonate with the personas in a direct and meaningful way.
At the end of the day, it’s focusing on these keywords that will allow you to get traffic, build your brand and ultimately drive affiliate traffic to the specific offers you’re promoting.
Step #3: Setting Up Your Landing Pages
Although standard SEO and landing page rules apply here, we need to keep in mind that we’re focusing on the user’s experience above all else. So no matter what you decide to place on the landing page, it needs to take the user closer to their goal.
Step #4: Setting the Right Metrics
The main thing we’re measuring with user-centered SEO is how well users are interacting with our landing pages and the goals we’ve set.
So naturally, you need to begin tracking specific metrics that will allow you to have a good look at your performance in that matter.
Some ideas:
- conversion rates coming from user-centered SEO in comparison to your overall conversion rates,
- bounce rates (again, user-centered SEO vs. the rest),
- time on site, and so on.
Taking care of the above four steps gives you a lot of possibilities for improvement and ultimately increasing your ROI from SEO. The more you improve the way users interact with your site, the more you’ll earn.