Insight from SES that will help your audience development efforts
Online publishers have an advantage that print publishers never had.
This advantage is Google, which affords many opportunities for publishers to build their audience with the help of its search engine and analytic tools.
Are you properly harnessing the power of Google? If not, you may be missing out on a slew of new audience members.
Ways to use Google for audience development
I recently attended the SES Conference in New York City. During the three days, I found some new ways to use Google for audience development while being reinforced on concepts I was already aware of. The information derived from SES was from a session with Bruce Clay entitled SEO 101.
5 Audience Development Tips
Audience Development Tip #1: Learn how to search using the tilde (~). If you include a tilde in your search query, it will retrieve results that are common to the community surrounding your keyword. For instance, I search the term “~content”. Google retrieved related words that I could further research as relevant keywords if I was building a cluster off the term “content”. The related words were bolded and the most relevant websites came up first in the search results. These are terms that you will need to focus on if you want to rank on long-tail results.
When I search “~content” the first three related keywords that were retrieved were:
-Knowledge
-Concentration
-Document
As you can tell, there is some relation between the term “content” and these three results. They won’t be the most important, relevant keywords to focus your attention on, but they will likely help to gain additional audience members if you do end up using those terms in your written content.
[text_ad use_post=”15014″]
Audience Development Tip #2: Consider Behavioral Keyword Research. It is often overlooked that Google remembers prior searches made by a user. This is done to remove the ambiguity of single searches. If you want to rank well in Google, think about what the population of your users might have already searched for, and what terms they will search for next. Covering these topics in SEO will help you better serve the community and likely provide content the user is looking for. Remember, in Google’s mind, audience development is about the aggregate search, not the single search.
Yahoo Clues is a tool that can help you find examples of prior search queries for a term, and queries that are likely to come next.
Audience Development Tip #3: Include clarification words for proper audience development. Tell Google the intent behind your site. For instance, if you are an informative website that interested searchers can use for research purposes, it’s valuable to let Google know that. Terms like “tips, advice, help, free info” will help to do this.
If you are a retail site, you can use a term like “free shipping” and still satisfy both your customers and Google.
Audience Development Tip #4: Use a linear distribution of keywords. There have been times when other online editors have asked me where keywords should be used throughout the page. You do not want to have your keywords only at the top of an article. To be most successful with SEO efforts, you should distribute your keywords throughout the entire article by using it at least once in every paragraph. Words like “it”, “them” or “that” typically hold the place of where a keyword can be inserted.
Audience Development Tip #5: Reuse and recycle content. Publishing frequently can make it easier to gain market share and ultimately increase your audience development efforts. It is OK to reuse and recycle content and most online publishers do engage in this activity often. When doing so, make sure you have at least 20% new content, or Google will filter it as duplicate content.
For more on how publishers are successfully using Google as an audience development partner, join us on April 12th for Building Online Partnerships with Carl Kravetz, the publisher of Vida y Salud.
