Are You Using Your Single Shot Well?
Hello WA brotherhood, Patience here. I hope you’re all coping with these hard times where our entire globe is dealing with COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying woes. I am sure you’re also using this time to give your online businesses what we’ve always craved for – More time.
Talking about time, I want to share with you friends something I’ve learned about the opportunity each of us gets whenever he/she ranks for a certain keyword that could be passing right under our noses.
Some of you could be already aware of this opportunity but a refresher wouldn’t hurt. More so, it might make you go back to your website and fix certain things that you’ve been putting off for a while.
Let me illustrate it this way,
What would you do if you’ve been allowed to describe what you’re selling to your potential audience? An audience you’ve always craved to talk to? It’s more like a single shot thing that you’ve got to make it count. Right?
Well, that’s the opportunity you get whenever your website ranks for a certain keyword you’re targeting. It’s as if search engines are saying: “Hey, our audience wants to hear about stuff you’re talking about. Please go ahead.”
I am sure you would want to make every word you say count; This is not the time you’d leave matters to Google to figure out what’s in your posts that it can tell your audience, and neither would you want anything to limit your creativity.
Yet that’s what some of us do knowingly or unknowingly. How? Let me give a real example.
I ran this keyword: “fun things to do when you retire” in Google, I aimed to see which websites are ranking for this keyword, and if competing is viable. And here’s what I got.
As you can see, these websites have got their way to the first page and it’s as if they have got their single shot so to speak and they’ve got to use well.
One commendable thing that we can see in all these four results is that; They have not left it to Google to show the headline as set by the default All in One SEO or the Yoast plugin headline settings.
However, there’s something that might be passing the opportunity right under their nose – Search intent.
Let’s take the last three for example, these are big brands that have already made their names.
I don't know why they decided to add their brand names in the headlines whether they thought that including their already known brand names in the headline could grab the attention of those who already know them, we don't know.
But what we know here is that including their names in the headlines is limiting their creativity, it's not helping them cater for the searcher's intent which is the key factor here. Remember it’s the reason why someone conducted the search in the first place.
So much as it’s not bad to include your brand or website name in the headlines, it’s not a must that you should include it on every post that you create.
In this case, the person who’s searching for fun things to do after retirement isn’t interested in your brand name, he/she wants to see something that has at least the word fun in it.
You see, all of us are somehow selfish when we search for something online; We don't care whether you're a famous brand or not, all we want is seeing something that answers our query period.
So in this case sixtyandme somehow can grab the searcher's attention not quite well but he somehow aimed at the search intent of his prospective visitor.
That way even Google felt like he's the perfect fit for this particular keyword.
What's the Take Home?
Much as it’s a good thing to have your name in the headlines of certain posts, putting them on every post might pass the opportunity under our nose. So, whenever you creat a post, give serious thought to what you write in the All in One SEO snippet, it should aim at the intent of your potential visitors.
This can help you grab their attention and thus payoff on the efforts you invested in researching that keyword, writing the article, and ultimately grow your leads.
How Do You Do It?
First you’ll need to install the All in One SEO plugin if you haven’t done so. Others prefer the Yoast SEO plugin. Either way, there are many articles here at WA that can help you with installation.
Simply use the search bar right above this page and you'll be able to find some good stuff right here within WA.
And once you’ve installed the plugin you’ll need to go to your site’s backend and then to All in One SEO then to General settings. In the general settings scroll down until you find “Title Settings”
Once there, in the dialog box you’ll see something like this: %post_title% | %site_title%, that is the setting that determines how your post will look like in search engines.
Simply remove the last | %site_title% part and click update settings. Alternatively, you can delete the whole line, it’s still okay, the objective is to remove your site name that will be already filling some of the 60-character limit which leaves you with little creativity when writing your post headline in the All in One SEO snippet below the post area in your WordPress backend.
Here's an illustration showing how it looks like in your backend.
After doing that, you’ll have more flexibility to create catchy headlines with more characters to play around with.
Ranking on Google's first page won’t mean that everyone who views your website link will follow to check it out but if you seize that opportunity and tell your potential visitors what touches their search intent, you might grab their attention and ultimately make your single shot count.
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