Forget about the online tech bros promising you SEO success so long as you pay for their magic formulas. The only magic required for a successful SEO strategy is the magic that you and your brand bring to your consumers (and how you plan to tell them all about it online).

Fantastic SEO content begins with them – your consumers. More specifically who they are and how they speak.

You need to be able to balance your brand’s tone of voice with SEO techniques. Sounds difficult, right? It’s easier than you think, so as your PR-for-SEO-obsessed digital marketing and creative agency, let us give you some advice on how to appease both the humans and the bots when it comes to online visibility.

Ready to revel in SEO (search engine opulence, obviously)? Keep reading to find out more

Know your audience

Before you even start writing any content and forming a tone of voice, you need to know who your audience is. Do you know what your customers’ interests and pain points are? How do they speak? Knowing your customer inside out is really beneficial for your SEO plans for multiple reasons. 

Firstly, you need to have a pretty good idea of what their challenges are and how you can help solve them. This way you can tailor your content to what they’re searching for which will increase the likelihood of you popping up on their radar. Secondly, if you can create content in a way that speaks to your audience, they’ll be more likely to engage with it for longer, reducing your ‘bounce rate’ and improving search engine rankings.

Don’t fall for SEO trends

You don’t need to hustle to emulate the latest trend that you just read about, but well done for doing your research! Again, all you need to worry about is your audience and your tone of voice.

Talk to them in a way that they know, that they expect and that they already love to hear from you.

You’ll have more success injecting your passion and knowledge into content and it’ll allow your expertise to shine while forming messaging in a way that feels good for both you and your target audience.

Hook ‘em in the headline

There’s a fine line between clickbait and an enticing headline. Being able to strike the balance between a juicy, brand-appropriate headline and adding searchable keywords can be difficult but is so worth it. 

Keywords, but make them clever

Successful search engine optimisation hinges on the use of keywords – so you should fill articles and blog posts with them, right? Wrong. 

You need to take care not to ‘keyword stuff’ as search engine crawlers may flag your posts as spam and penalise your site, stopping you from climbing up the result pages (and who doesn’t want to get to the top of Google?).

Google Search (other search engines are available!) is smarter than ever and can also spot words and phrases that are related to what your target audience is searching for, meaning that you don’t need to repeat the same wording (and who wants to read the same thing over and over and over again?)

By creating media-rich, well-written and accessible content, you can please both your human readers and the bots crawling your site… If you know your onions, then hopefully you’re already creating engaging and informative content that your audience wants to see without too much planning.

Readability reigns

If you are looking to rank with more obscure keywords and phrases, you may need to do some more keyword research and plan your sentences around them.

Writing with more specific phrases can help you rank highly for them, or draw in a particular niche demographic but be mindful as they can cause content to be confusing or boring.

Trying to boost SEO doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice clarity, personality or something that is simply well-written.

Using short sentences, active voice and bullet points can help keep text visually interesting and easier to read. The key is to keep viewers reading and clicking around.

Embrace the authentic

Remember why people love your brand and stay true to it. It’s a fact that consumers nowadays are craving authenticity, trustworthiness and personality from brands.

By being brave enough to show snippets from behind-the-scenes, thought leadership and even using employees to build audiences and communities, brands are finding success online.

This keeps engagement high (bonus if they’re finding the connection from a site you own and control) and can result in social media shares, further boosting brand awareness and gaining more link equity. It’s all about the bigger marketing picture.

Conclusion

SEO is a powerful tool but it shouldn’t mute your brand’s personality. Try some of these tips and see how high you can climb up the SERPs (search engine result pages), all while being true to your brands tone of voice, attracting the right audience and building loyalty.

If you’re feeling like you’re struggling for time or skill, why not read up on our digital PR services or drop us an email?