SEO is an online marketing tool widely used in business districts, such as Toronto and across the world. Once reliant simply on keyword density, regarded as the strongest ranking factor of a website, the growth of online marketing has since allowed SEO to evolve. Today, SEO standards rely less on keyword density, and more on content quality. Certainly Google, Bing, and Yahoo shared part of the blame for the low caliber of the content, as optimizers simply operated on the rules of the game at the time.
Today, as a result of a variety of Google’s algorithm changes, SEO online marketing content is required to be competitive from a quality standpoint, and search engine optimization has evolved into search experience optimization, helping you optimize your audience’s experience.
Online Marketing that Supports the User Experience
Online marketing is about enhancing the experience of your audience in Toronto. The consumer’s journey starts with a search query (a Google search). We usually never know which words a particular customer typed in a search bar to get to a page, but we know the page they landed on when they reached our website. Based on data from Google Search Console, we know which keywords and phrases a page is ranking for, and we can make an educated guess as to what keywords customers use to arrive on a page. We then use this data to build a catalogue of keywords and phrases, each of which may dictate a completely different user intent.
Identifying Marketing Gaps
SEO online marketing revolves around the analysis of the catalogue. The catalogue of keywords and phrases serve as our inventory of the Toronto customers’ intentions, and allows us to review content to identify the gaps the offered experience, like objectives consumers may have that websites fail to fulfill. The online marketing gaps vary by website purpose and consumer intent. Each page and set of intentions require a content plan.
Here are some common SEO marketing gaps seen in Toronto online retailers’ websites:
- A broken Path. The consumer’s xperience is interrupted by a navigation issue or landing on a page too far down the path.
- Unanswered Questions. The consumer has a question, like “how do I use a product?”, or “where can I find it?”, which the website fails to answer. This interrupts the consumer’s experience, forcing them to return to the search engine and away from that page or website.
- Stock. A retail website doesn’t stock the product the customer is seeking. In this case, it may be up to the merchandising partners to determine if they have a gap in the website’s assortment.
SEO is Creating Content for Users
The purpose of SEO in online marketing is to optimize content for your Toronto customers, not for search engines. SEO is simply utilizing the information consumers provide Google to determine their content needs, and content’s quality is defined by how well the content serves the customer.
Interested in using online marketing to ensure and maximize your audience’s consumer experience? Call 360 Business Local at (416) 619-7935 to learn more about how you can grow your business online with SEO.