The next category of off-page SEO that’s worth taking a look at is personal factors. I’m talking about demographics and location. These factors automatically impact the way someone responds to your content, but your SEO efforts also behave differently from one area of the globe to another.
While most of these are out of your control, you can do a few things to increase your chances of reaching a certain audience. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” option when it comes to personal SEO factors.
Elements of Personal SEO Factors
Here are the biggest factors impacting personal SEO:
Country
All searchers see results relevant to the country they’re in. Open times of recommended stores and restaurants appear according to your time zone.
Search engines interpret words differently. Someone searching for “comforter” in the U.S. will see blankets for their bed, whereas someone in the U.K. might see pacifiers because that’s what the term means there. A way to tell Google you want to target certain countries is, of course, by including them as keywords.
However, first, ask yourself if it’s worth it to go multinational. There are different competition levels from country to country. Remember how keyword selection depends largely on the competition already ranking? Well, Google Canada is going to have different results than Google Brazil. Each country might have different levels of difficulty. A multilingual site not only exposes your information to more people in their native language, but it could also help you rank easier in other places.
Creating multilingual content is one of the easiest ‘quick wins’ I’ve seen. However, pulling it off isn’t easy. Most of the web’s translation plugins aren’t very good. Many will promise to automatically translate your content into almost any language, but the end result isn’t natural.
Personally, I’d rather pay a little more to have native-speaking people help translate the content. The quality and accuracy increase, which means people stick around longer, and my site usage data and rankings go up.
City
Geo-targeting goes even further, down to the city level. That’s why you usually see results from right around the block when you search for a fast-food chain. Using city names as keywords helps, but don’t paint yourself into a corner, or you’ll end up looking like you’re only a local authority.
That said, if you are a local authority and your business primarily deals in the local area, you want to capitalize on this with great local SEO.
3 Tips to Improve the Personal Factors
I have three simple tips to help you improve the personal factors impacting your SEO:
- Understand your customer avatar: Only you can understand who your customer is, and if you don’t have a persona of your ideal customer, that’s the first step to personal SEO. What does your customer want? Why are they looking for you? What do they expect when they land on your site? If you answer these questions properly, you should be able to give the customer exactly what they expect. When you do that, Google rewards you because people spend more time on your site and interact with the elements on the site.
- Produce multilingual content: Having content in different languages isn’t as hard as you think. You’re breaking down so many barriers when you do this by allowing people who aren’t native English speakers to absorb whatever value you offer.
- Research keywords in other countries: Almost all of the keyword research tools allow you to conduct research for other countries. If you’re targeting people outside of your native country, you need to perform the right keyword research to reach those people.