When you’re working on your SEO, you need to remember who you’re trying to attract to your website.
It’s not Google, it’s not Bing, it’s not any search engine … it’s people!
They’re the ones that are making searches, the ones that you want to visit your website, and the ones that you should be trying to resonate with by making your SEO more human.
Not sure how to do that? Keep reading as we go through five simple ways of humanising your SEO!
Write your titles for people
It’s easy to get caught up in trying to add keywords wherever there’s an opportunity, especially when some SEO tools like Yoast or SEMrush shout at you saying “Hey! You haven’t added your focus keyword at the start of that title!”
While adding a keyword at the start of your title seems great from an SEO standpoint, it might sound a bit stilted or disengaging for your website visitors.
Take this blog post, for example. We’ve titled it ‘5 Ways to Humanise Your SEO’. Why? Because it’s short, sweet, and you, the reader, will know exactly what you’re getting when you come across it in search results.
SEMrush might tell us that we haven’t got our focus keyword, SEO, at the start of the title, but, if we titled it ‘SEO – 5 ways to humanise it’, it doesn’t sound as good, does it?
When you’re writing your meta titles, heading tags, or any other headlines on your site, always write for people first. You can then tweak them to find the right balance of audience engaging, SEO-friendly copy.
Only link where it adds value
Internal linking is super important for SEO.
It helps Google understand the context of your web pages, and when done correctly, can create a structure that search engines will use to understand and rank your content.
More importantly though, it can guide your website users through different pages of your site and can nurture them towards taking an action that you want them to complete; like getting in touch, signing up to your newsletters, or downloading your brochure.
Just like with creating content and writing your website copy, you should take a people-first approach to your internal linking strategy too.
Put it this way, if you’ve written a brand new, engaging article but link to outdated content that doesn’t hold any value to the reader, they’ll be disappointed when they click the link and find it’s just wasted their time.
Only add internal links where it makes sense and adds value to your audience, and don’t link just for the sake of linking!
Create content for people, not search engines
People-first content is in, and search engine first content is out.
If you want to be more human with your website and SEO, you should focus on creating content that will provide value to the people that you want to reach, rather than just trying to write content that you think will rank better.
Since Google’s latest update, writing people-first content isn’t just an option now, it’s a necessity if you want to keep your audience engaged and improve your SEO.
If you haven’t heard about Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ update yet, check out our previous blog post, that breaks down the latest changes and what it means for your SEO.
Create an effortless user experience
User experience is everything and delivering a bad one just isn’t an option.
You might think that people will love your fancy website with all the bells and whistles, but if the pages take a century to load, or you’ve over complicated your user interface in your attempts to stand out, you’ll just frustrate and alienate your visitors.
But it’s not just bad for your visitors, it’s also bad for SEO.
When Google sees that your site is slow loading, flooded with complicated code and elements, and has a massive bounce rate, you’ll start to slip down the rankings.
Don’t choose style over substance. Sometimes keeping things simple and creating an amazing user experience is the best way to keep both the people using your website, and search engines happy.
Focus on keywords that will add value
Optimising your website for high-volume search keywords that show immediate intent to buy is great for increasing your organic traffic and leads.
But what about the people that are at the top of your funnel? How are you going to reach and provide value to them?
Start by thinking about the problems that your ideal customers face, and the searches that they’ll make to find solutions.
If you’re creating content that provides clear and easy to follow solutions to those problems, you’ll start to reach and nurture more top-of-the-funnel customers by providing value.
You might also find that your content will rank higher by covering keywords and search phrases with less competition.
Nurturing potential customers and ranking higher at the same time? That’s a win-win!
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In your 90-minute, 1-2-1 session, you’ll chat with our founder Adam and some of our business growth specialists about the challenges that you’re facing with your business growth and marketing, and how you can overcome them.
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- A free website and user experience review
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