The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Understanding Your Audience and Finding Your Niche

A nontrivial part of an SEO plan is figuring out who you are targeting with your website. This is not always that easy to determine. As you will see in this section, many factors enter into this, including the competition, the particular strengths or weaknesses of your own company, and more.

Mapping Your Products and Services

Successful SEO requires a thorough understanding of the business itself. What products, services, and types of information and resources does your organization have to offer?

As we outlined in the preceding section, a critical SEO activity is understanding who is searching for what you are trying to promote, which requires thoroughly understanding all aspects of your offering. You will also need to understand the broad market categories that your products fall into, as each of these categories might relate to sections of your website that you may want to create. By having sections of the site for those categories, you create an opportunity to obtain search traffic related to those categories.

You also should consider business development and the company’s expansion strategy at the outset of the SEO planning process. Consider Amazon, which began as a bookseller but has evolved into a general purpose e-tailer. Sites that go through these types of changes may need to be substantially restructured, and such restructurings can be a source of major SEO headaches. Anticipating those changes in advance provides the opportunity ...