Episode summary
The ultimate goal of SEO is to capture buyers through search.
This means being found when a buyer is searching for commercial keywords that relate to your business.
Being found for these keywords is critical for your website to generate pipeline.
In this episode of Websites Decoded, Phil breaks down the connected website tactics to rank for high-intent, commercial keywords.
Tune in to learn how to rank for high-intent, commercial keywords - the key to more qualified traffic and increased website conversions.
Episode transcript
SEO is sometimes misunderstood, I think. And the ultimate goal, and the most important goal should be that your website is found by buyers when they use commercial terms.
The keywords that describe intent to purchase a specific solution to a problem being found for those keywords is critical to your website creating pipeline.
Because try as you might, if you're only found for long tail informational, blog type queries, and you use those to generate leads, you're going to struggle to nurture those leads through to the point of purchase.
It's far more important to be found organically by buyers when they're looking to purchase after they found you multiple times whilst researching the purchase.
So getting your website to rank for those commercial keywords is a very important part of overall SEO.
How to rank for high-intent keywords
Ranking for those high-intent commercial keywords starts with knowing what they are, doing keyword research to identify the phrases and words that buyers use when they look for and describe the solution you offer.
Knowing what those keywords are so that you can build them into the structure, the URLs, the titles and the content of your main pages is the cornerstone of later success.
Because if your website features those keywords in its URLs and in its page titles, it will be significantly easier to rank for those terms than if you don't. It's not impossible, but it's harder.
Structuring your content
Then when you've done that you can use the other pages of your site to improve the position that those pages appear at. And that's by structuring the organisation of those pages and the links within them so that they all point up to the commercial pages using the keywords that you want them to be found for.
Internal linking
So, for example, deeper sites within your main structure linking up to the main commercial pages, pillar pages that are on broad informational topics linking to key commercial pages using commercial keywords. Then using blog articles and other pieces of content linking up to the pillar pages and the commercial pages using the informational and commercial keywords that they are optimised for.
This all creates what I think of as a kind of pyramid of strength, if you like, within SEO or, creates the hull of a ship pushing you forward by having everything aligned to the point, to the front.
Consistently using the right keywords will in most cases have a significant impact on where your main commercial keyword-optimised pages appear for those commercial keyword search results.
Where do backlinks fit in?
Everyone knows that backlinks are incredibly powerful and I think that sometimes leads us to believe that internal linking isn't worth doing because backlinks are so much more powerful.
Now it's true, backlinks are powerful, but people know they're powerful and therefore they're also exponentially harder to get. You can sink an awful lot of energy into trying to get one backlink, or an awful lot of money even, and you might fail.
Now, if you succeed that backlink may have a positive impact on your results, but it's high risk, high reward. Whereas you have total control over your internal linking.
Internal linking at the scale that you can do it within your own site and your own content can have a profound impact on your results. And we've seen it do that over and over again.
So, I always advise that businesses prioritise internal linking, prioritise doing it using exact match keywords, which people often neglect to do out of fear that it will harm their SEO in some way that isn't actually documented.
By all means, go after backlink opportunities, but don't bet your success on it, given how incredibly hard it is nowadays to get those backlinks ethically.