A Buyer Persona Most Neglected
UPDATE: Video transcript available for ‘A Buyer Persona Most Neglected’.
I did the show live from Hawaii yesterday. We hit over 200 people in the live audience across Meerkat, Periscope and the web. We had a discussion before I started recording about what to cover.
The subject came up about backlinks.. groan. Don’t get me wrong, back in the day that is pretty much all SEO was about. I even had a disagreement a few years ago with the inventor of the web, Tim Berners Lee on the topic. We try to get our clients to think past the tricks and focus on what their customers want, the buyer personas. One important buyer persona that most site owners neglect is the Googlebot. It’s a question I continually ask my staff “How would the Googlebot feel about that page?” .
At the the PBEvent that I attended last week the topic of buyer personas came up a lot.
The Googlebot is mainly neglected by having messy and confusing sites. In my experience this is especially true with the blogging community. There is a wide range of issues but mostly they fall into the area of duplication and errant plugins causing potential Panda issues. For most sites, once these problems are fixed they’ll see a good boost in traffic.
Forget About Backlinks
I’ve written about this before. As you will see in today’s show you can get on page one with only 6 backlinks for a very competitive phrase. The irony of the blogging community is that they already doing the hard part of SEO. Content. Their backlinks for the most part are wonderful. They may not have massive publications linking to them but they have very relevant targeted backlinks that have been achieved by simply have great content. If you go down the path of chasing backlinks you’ll end up with a site that may rank ok.. until the next Penguin update. In the meantime you’ll neglect not only the Googlebot but your customers as well.
Heading To Vegas for ThinkGlobal Retail.
Next stop Vegas baby! I’ll be speaking at the conference and have a booth there so come and say hi 🙂 I think next week’s live show will be coming to you from the Mojave desert. Make sure you follow me on Periscope and Meerkat @jimboot to watch. It’s every week Australian Eastern Standard Time at midday.
Are you Still Chasing Backlinks? Love to hear if you are.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
