In an age where purchasing decisions are often guided by what your target audience types into their search bar, SEO is more important than ever. Investing some time and money in optimizing your site and helping it rank is important, but you need to make sure that you’re getting a return on that investment, as well.
To that end, being specific is often the best approach to any SEO strategy. Here, we’re going to look at what specificity can mean and how you can implement it to better succeed in your SERP rankings.
1. Be Specific With Your Keywords
Most of the time, thinking about SEO might have you thinking about writing content designed to attract visitors, specifically by using the keywords that they’re likely to be searching for on Google. Making sure that you have some presence with more general keywords can ensure that you’re not being uncompetitive in large traffic spaces, but specific, long-tail keywords often have the intent and relevance that makes you more likely to engage a specific audience.
These terms have lower competition and higher conversion potential. By tailoring content to specific searches, you align more closely with what users are really looking for.
2. Be Specific With Your Location
It’s important to note that local SEO does not fit the needs of all businesses. If your business is international or online-only and doesn’t have specific locations for customers to interact with, then you may be able to ignore this one. However, for businesses with a physical location or a defined service area, geo-targeted keywords like “best emergency plumber in
Optimizing your Google Business Profile, including localized content, and earning backlinks from local sources all improve local visibility. The more geographically specific your SEO is, the more likely your business is to appear in “near me” recommendations or map-based searches.
3. Be Specific With Your Industry
Another reason you want to avoid going too broad with keywords and methodology is that, depending on your industry, showing your expertise can help you build authority, which in turn leads to trust. Using sector-specific terminology, targeting relevant queries, and aligning with industry pain points signals to both users and search engines that your content is backed up by expertise.
A law firm that is targeting “intellectual property litigation,” for instance, is likely to get more qualified leads from one that optimizes for “legal help.” The more industry-specific your content is, and the more it displays your authority, the more likely you are to get backlinks from forums and publications within that sector.
4. Be Specific With Your Size
The size of your business is not necessarily something you need to advertise with your SEO-driven content, but it is certainly something that can affect the strategies you make use of. For instance, small businesses can’t often compete with big brands on high-volume keywords, so they may better rank by focusing on hyper-specific niches, local terms, and long-tail keywords.
Enterprise-level SEO solutions, on the other hand, are more effective for larger businesses that offer multiple services across different audiences and regions. Those businesses may need to be able to segment their SEO efforts by product, audience, or other specifics. Larger organizations with bigger sites may also need to focus on longer-term efforts to manage technical SEO, which becomes more complex alongside your site structure.
5. Be Specific With Your Backlinks
As hinted, content is not the only thing that drives your SEO, which is something that a lot of businesses new to the discipline tend to miss. Backlinks are critical as well, and creating valuable content that’s likely to attract them, as well as building your relationships with PR teams, publications, and blogs, can be vital for earning them.
You’re a lot more likely to generate backlinks by focusing less on pumping out more generic content, but instead by honing down on in-depth guides that are tailored towards niche topics. Experts, bloggers, and journalists are more likely to link to unique insights or detailed how-tos that serve a specific audience. Specificity helps you carve out a thought leadership space that’s hard to replicate.
6. Be Specific With Products
If you’re focusing on trying to increase sales or traffic through product pages, then you have to understand how SEO can work for such pages. Customers aren’t going to be looking for products using generic terms, or even through value-based long-tail keywords.
They’re more likely to be searching for exact models, colors, sizes, or use cases. Optimizing each product page with detailed descriptions, unique metadata, user reviews, and long-tail keywords that incorporate different details can increase your chances of ranking for those very specific buyer intents.
Ensure that your product descriptions include rich snippets and structured data, rather than just a single list of bullet points, as well. People who are searching for products to buy are usually very close to the point of conversion, so being specific with the details of your products is important to nab those sales before someone else does.
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