In a pickle. SEO for Personal Brand, Book or Keywords?
-
I'm getting ready to take on a new client for SEO, but she is having a hard time understanding I'd like to rank her for "Her" and her new book, rather than keywords for her ambiguous keywords which show very little to no search volume from Keyword Planner data.
- Her website and domain name are only 4 months old
- Her book launches sometime in December (most likely January 2016)
- Her services (she's a consultant) provide little keyword volume
- She is persuaded she needs to rank for her service keywords
- I feel strongly we need to get her name, her method/approach and her book optimized
- She is seemingly difficult to work with, but once I build trust in SEO for her, so will be a great, long client
- Her consulting services are based on Change and Transition for wealthy individuals going through career change, divorce, pay increase, pay decrease, depression, children, etc... targeting Executives, C-Level Execs
In this situation, what would you all do? How would this website or person even be optimized? Blog articles? Press releases? Guest blogging? Video blogs? Podcasts? It's a tricky one and hoping the Moz community can lend some ideas as this type of SEO would be new for me, yet I'm up for the challenge!
Thank you in advance and look forward to your replies! - Patrick
-
Thanks so much for the response, Kane.
She is very particular in the content placed on her website. I didn't work with her on her website or her existing pages, navigation, and content, so I'm coming in fresh and from what I know, she was tough to deal with on the content portions.
Adding more pages about her services probably isn't realistic as she doesn't dive into her "services" on the website nor does she want to. She has this false sense that her clients KNOW what she does and will search for her "method". Yet, when you Google her "method", nothing shows.
This led me to talk with her about and be very honest with her, that her name, her method and her book need to be the focal point. So, when people do hear about her, and then Google her, they will get the bigger picture vs just searching for a service keyword and her showing up.
Another challenge is, her budget is low. It will increase, but have to prove it works. I explained this is a limiting factor, but will see where it goes.
We will focus on blog articles, a few press releases, a couple SlideShare presentations about her method and book outline and wish we could do videos, but she will never do a video, but she enjoys and does do speaking engagements.
We also discussed getting her to do more podcast type interviews and try to get her in front of bloggers or podcasters as she speaks very well and would be comfortable doing that.
This will make for an interesting case study if it all works out the way I want it to. One thing I won't allow is for it to ruin or soil my reputation or our mutual brand consultant's image.
Thanks again, Kane! I do appreciate your input. - Patrick
-
Without knowing the keywords themselves, my guess is that if there's no search volume then they're probably not very hard to rank for, so you should tackle all of the above.
Convince her to focus on name + book on the appropriate pages, and create dedicated service pages for any of the other keywords if she wants to pursue those as well. She's going to need to create those service pages anyways to explain exactly what she does, and she'll be pleased to see those service pages ranking soon enough.
At a high level - sounds like stuff around "executive career coaching" and "executive career development". There's definitely some search volume around those types of phrases, so perhaps convince her to go after the bigger ones instead.
Show her the list of keywords she's suggesting and that you're suggesting, in order of difficulty and where they would fit into a content map of the website, and try to agree on a prioritized list to work on, and get her to contribute 300-600 words of copy for those service pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What does lower impressions on branded terms represent?
Hey everyone! Apologise if this has been answered somewhere else, if so let me know. I work as an in-house SEO for a private healthcare company. Recently it's been a struggle to bring in consistent traffic and it's getting tougher to replicate traffic figures for the month before, let alone improve. Rankings are consistent if not improving in some areas and I've done work to maintain or improve CTR from page title and meta etc. I've been considering a few factors and making sure I'm performing the best I can be but, using both Keyword Planner and Search Console, I've noticed that search volume and impressions for our branded terms and industry specific terms like "nursing agencies" have dropped. My question is: Does this represent an industry trend and it's a case of trying to gain as much traffic from a diminishing pool? If so, this might make sense. It's worth me noting that we are a national company and recently there has been a amount of negative PR around our entire industry.
Search Behavior | | grantcole910 -
A Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking but why?
Hi, I wondered if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before, one of our customers has a website JDB Events (http://www.jdb-events.com/). When he first came to us he was using Fast Hosts and he was experiencing down time pretty much every day in periods of up to an hour. The first step before carrying out any SEO was to place the website on our VPS so that the downtime issue was resolved. It did resolve the issue and the speed of the website was also increased. My next issue was to address the length of the Title on the home page because it was 157 characters, I usually keep these to 70 characters. This is the old Meta Title: JDB Events Limited - Event, Production & AV Hire Specialists | The West Midlands Dance Floor Hire, LED Furniture, DJ, Disco Hire & Event Services Specialists Here is the my new Meta Title: JDB Events | LED Furniture Hire for Parties and Corporate Events I have attached a screenshot of the drop that I have experienced, would anyone recommend that it's ok to keep the title longer so that I can cram more search terms into it, I use Woo Rank as a bench mark and this recommends shortening the title but I would be interested in hearing anyone's views. Other steps that I have taken: Shortened the home page description WWW Resolve Added Robots.txt Crawled all of the pages for 404 errors etc The next step I'm thinking of taking is replacing the amended meta title and description for the old one and monitoring that, other than that I can't see why I have taken such a hit. Thanks NewServerSpeedTest.png OldServerSpeedTest.png Rankings.png
Search Behavior | | chrissmithps0 -
Google PageRank and google keyword ranks
Hi, I manage around 13 Clients for SEO and this last two weeks i have been having problems with google keyword ranking some of my clients went down almost 40 positions for some keywords other 15 other stayed the same and some just went down 1 or 5 positions. Somebody know what is happening with google? is it shuffling around positions of people? Any advice or how you do your SEO I'm willing to work together and share experiences and tactics on SEO to people that also share with me in order to build more strategies on this amazing market. Thanks.
Search Behavior | | computernc0 -
How to approach SEO for a large site that doesn't have specific keyword goals?
So, I have a project that has 10,000+ page of unique editorial content in a specific industry. They currently get about 500,000 pageviews a month and average just under 2 pages per visit. It has a 66 domain authority and has been doing "the basics" for SEO for about 7 years (headline is an H1, URL is custom while the headline is more "reader friendly", description is a snippet of the body copy a little into the first paragraph, nofollow in the comments). The crux is that it's an editorial publication so they're not targeting specific keywords, but a wide swath of keywords. Would it be best to just dive in and figure out some of the less competitive keywords for some of the articles that they could tailor some content to rank better for, then just move onto more and more? What are some ways to approach this if they just want to raise their general traffic and relevancy to the next level?
Search Behavior | | jpea0 -
Google analytics realtime reporting same keywords with different capitalization
I was just looking in my analytics and I saw something I have never seen before. Maybe its old news but its new to me. I have attached a screen shot. I have 2 keywords listed which are the same but are capitalized different scrabble dictionary Scrabble dictionary Does Google really consider these different? PlstfwR
Search Behavior | | cbielich0 -
Books about Content Marketing & Persona creation?
Hello SEOmoz, First question here on the forum, but a silent follower for years 🙂 I'm looking for a good book - you define what is "good" - about content marketing and or persona creation that you read and proved to be usable in real-life situations I've read "Accelerate" but found it too light-weight. Therefore your recommendations would come very in handy. Looking forward to your replies! Best regards, Nikolaas
Search Behavior | | TheReference1 -
Interesting keyword ranking issue
Hello Everybody, Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Without further ado, I'll jump straight to it: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk is the web site of a UK based data recovery company. Historically the site has always ranked well for popular data recovery keywords in the UK, with page 1 rankings for most things data recovery related. However, lately things seem to have changed for our most important phrase "data recovery". We noticed several months ago that Google had started to favour the page http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm instead of http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ when a search for "data recovery" (and similar) was performed. This didn't concern us that much as our rankings remained good. However now, neither of these pages seems to be ranking well when a search for "data recovery" is performed (I gave up at Page 5 - who looks past there when searching?). I would appreciate your input on this please - especially about the following points: 1. Why have these two pages now seemingly disappeared from SERPS when a search for "data recovery" is performed ? 2. Why has Google chosen http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm rather than http://www.dataclinic.co.uk ? 3. Is this just something to do with UK results ? 4. Other sites I would expect NOT to see in the top results have started appearing - despite their link profiles etc remaining poor - perhaps Google is doing a bit of reorganisation with SERPS related to data recovery at the moment ? 5. And perhaps, most importantly - do you think we need to do anything about our current lack of visibility ?? As I mentioned, we've always ranked well, so these results are puzzling... Should search results revert "back to normal" in a day or so, or am I missing something and need to take action ?? Thanks for any input on this - we would be very grateful indeed for you help ! Kind Regards, Sue
Search Behavior | | 3Amigos0 -
Can we rank as a related search query on a competitor's brand keyword?
One of my clients wanted to know whether it's possible for him to rank as one of the related pages on Google for a brand name of a competitor. I honestly don't know whether it's possible so any ideas whether it's possible and if so, ideas on what can be done is greatly welcome. Thank you in advance. 🙂
Search Behavior | | als0070