Real SEO Advice You Can Use: Week One - Determining Your Audience

Let's tackle our first step of good SEO practices and implementation. Your content or site is all about food. Let's say you review local restaurants. The type of people you want to come to your site are those who eat at restaurants. Pretty simple so far, right? So, you know what sort of people should be coming to your restaurant review site (your audience) - do you know how they would search to find your site or content? Knowing this simple bit of information is the key to getting your site listed and out there for your public to see. Knowing your audience and how they think is more important than anything else you will be doing within SEO.

How do you find out what your audience is thinking when they want to find your site or content? Easy - you need to simply think like your target audience. Actually, that sounds easier than it may be. If your content or site is a local restaurant review site, it can be as simple as opening up your browser, go to Google.com or Yahoo.com and type in the words you would use to find local restaurant review sites. What if your site or content is a bit more complicate than this? There are a few ways you can accomplish this:

1. Survey - you can try out Survey Builder or SurveyMonkey
2. Questionnaire - two sites to check are My3Q.com and FreePollKit.com
3. Direct Email - If you have a membership list built into your site, you can access this to send out personalized emails to find out how they found your site to begin with. Try to stay away from sending an impersonal message out to all your members - it's best to pick a few at a time and really think your email through before sending.
4. Face-to-face - If you find your membership to be very local, you can arrange to telephone - first contact them by email to find out if they would be interested in having you "pick their brain" for a few minutes.

Some of the information you will want to garner is:

1. How did they happen upon your site?
2. If they found you via a search engine, what did they use for keywords?
3. If they found you another way, determine if others found your site in the same manner.

Once this information is gathered, you can then use it to help you create your keyword and tag list (we'll cover this in a future article).

The bottom line? The most important key to getting more people to your site or content is those who already frequent your site or content. They are your first most valuable resource!

Next week: Creating a good SEO strategy - because a good plan is the best way to get started!