Your customers are out there, right now searching for your products. Are they going to find you? It’s imperative that you conduct the necessary tasks to ensure your website, products, and services are found within the search engines. However, it would be so much easier to be found if you understood how customers use search in the first place, right?
In this blog post, I’m going to discuss how customers use search to find the products, services and information they need. I’m also going to explain to you how you can capitalize on this information and use it to be found by these feverishly, searching, customers.
They Use Keyword Phrases and Questions
When your customers are searching for things on the Internet, they are not searching for keywords. Searchers have become way more savvy and search engines have become way more sophisticated. People now search using long-tail keywords, key phrases and most importantly questions.
Knowing this, you can now properly adjust your content so you are also using these long-tail keywords and phrases. If the search engines see you are using the same text as the person conducting the search, they will rank you higher than your competition who only optimized for a keyword or two.
But don’t forget about the questions. Customers love to search for keyword riddled questions. A question for this blog post may be “how do my customers find me in search?” or “how do my customers search for products”.
They search locally
Customers conducting searches on the Internet are prone to using their location in their searches. For example, they may be searching for beauty salons in 48234 area code or cheese shops in Baltimore. You will want to ensure your content contains relevant location specific key phrases and questions.
Now a word of caution, this is really on specific to those businesses who sell locally or in a specific country. Italian restaurants in the United States isn’t going to give a place I can go eat this evening here in North Carolina. Remember, people are going to be specific and you should be too.
They’re Relying on Voice Assistance
Many customers are good at using Siri and Alexa to help them conduct their searches. The game plan here is to optimize your website for voice search. Yes, there is a such thing as voice search optimization. It is important that you focus on this type of optimization along with your regular search engine optimization.
They’re Using Social Media
Search engines aren’t the only way people are searching any more. In fact, social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram are some of the biggest drivers of sales today. I can easily go on Instagram and type in #raleighweddingphotographer in the search and see a ton of images tagged with that hashtag. Now, all I need to do is look through the photos, find the one I like and reach out to those people.
Same goes with YouTube. YouTube is the second most widely used search engine in the world. People use YouTube for all type of searches, from learning how to do something to gathering information on the background of a company. YouTube is a great place to increase your reach. If you do not have a video strategy, what are you waiting for.
Understand where customers are search and how they are searching gives you the upper leg on what changes you should make to your strategies to ensure you are showing up everywhere your customers are search.
