We’re almost halfway through 2015 and I believe you know that high quality contents matter to your search visibility. If you are not happy with how your marketing strategy went through on the first quarter of the year, continue reading for some advice to reach your goals. To help you improve your SEO, we have provided a list of objectives that you and your team should focus on. These objectives should be reinforced by documenting your strategy and reviewing them every quarter. Here is the checklist: Know Your Audience Deeper This is a no brainer. Your audience is most likely the mjor source of your website’s traffic - and this is very likely to affect your total sales, too. You should consider your audience’s behavior when you are building a content strategy. Even if your audience come from a particular age bracket or geographical location, they will have different behaviors, expectations, and interests. Content marketers should understand these differences and create contents accordingly. Collect as much data as you can about current trends related to your audience. You may get data from search engines, social networks, and from other data companies. Start with a few metrics first like sharing and engagement patterns, then add more metrics as you go further. Search for your target terms and keywords on as many search engines as you can. This will show you which websites will be on the front page of result pages. You can also ask someone from your target location or age group to do this for a more realistic data. Visit the websites above and see what they offer the visitors. Do a study on what your audience expect from your brand - ask them through emails or surveys. Analyze all of this data, and create a strategy for each audience segment. Compare it to your avatar, and find out whether you need to change it or not. Optimize Your Contents For Your Audience Before optimizing your contents for search engines, you need to take care of what the visitors see when they look at your contents. It is a good idea to make sure that your audience will not leave your website for another just because their needs were not met. Engaging your audience will also make a positive impact on search engine visibility. It can give you more sales and leads as well. Identify the keywords and topics that your audience are searching for. Then create contents according to these. Try to deliver your contents in a conversational tone and easily digestible style. People will likely read what they easily understand. Create contents that can educate and entertain the readers. This will largely affect whether they will continue reading and sharing your contents. Provide references and supporting documents for your ideas so that you will be authoritative, credible, and trustworthy. Use other mediums to deliver contents to your audience - videos, podcasts, audio, animations, or emails. Then find out which of these is the most effective. Remember that your audience may be visiting your contents on a mobile device. You have to make sure that your audience have the same feel and experience either on desktops or mobile devices. Optimize Your Contents For Search Bots Ensuring that your audience love your contents is just one thing. You should not forget that many of your audience may find your contents through search engines, and so, you must make sure that search engines can “read” your contents properly. Search engines use bots to crawl the internet to search for all sorts of websites and contents. Search engine algorithms have been modified many times over, and currently, they rank contents that are “as human as possible” higher. Forget about stuffing your contents with keywords - they don’t work as well as they did a few years ago. It is about high quality contents now. Create and use a “content” calendar so you can publish contents regularly. This lets the users know when to search for your contents. Search engines also take consistent and regular publishing into account. Although keywords are not as strong as they were, but they still matter. Incorporate keywords into the contents as well as to the invisible part of your website - headlines, URL, page title, and meta descriptions. Find out which SEO tool works best for your style. Wordpress users may use Yoast’s plugin to make their contents SEO-friendly. Do your best to have quality links. Now, most search engines can detect if you just bought a link from another website. Authoritative bloggers and publications are the best sources of unsolicited links. Audit your website and contents regularly. I recommend doing this quarterly so that you can detect unnoticed mistakes and errors as soon as possible. Make unique pages for your contents. If you have a local business, you need to include local search on your optimization campaign. Provide as much detail as you can for individual locations. Check whether your sitemap is updated and if it works with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. If you don’t have a sitemap, create it now. Paying for advertisements or even mentions and shares in social networks is also a good idea, but be careful with it. Learn How You Do And Improve There are many tools and data companies out there that can tell you how you are doing and how you can improve your contents. This can provide you with the much needed kick in the behind so you will know where you fall short on, and improve your visibility, conversions, and engagement. Analytics tools like Google Analytics provides data about audience engagement, interests, and which type of contents create which amount of traffic and action from your visitors. Use these tools to your advantage. Analytics tools can also show how your contents do in terms of conversion funnels and total sales. But you will have to precisely define your goals first. Webmaster tools will help you find errors in your website like sitemap errors, missing URLs, alt text for images, and more. Don’t let these errors ruin your visitors’ experience. Tracking and heat mapping tools provide data on how visitors use your website. They can tell whether how long a user pointed the mouse to a specific link, or how long they stayed on a portion of the page. Analyze all collected data thoroughly to see which medium, length and type of contents, keywords, tone, and distribution channel perform the best and which performs the worst. Wrapping Up Use this checklist to help you improve your website’s and content’s search engine optimization. A list like this is a simple but effective tool so that you will not miss something that can negatively affect your results. Audit your contents, websites, and strategies regularly to control any damage to your results. For more great content and blog post visit SEOhacked.com