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It’s time to grab your “bots & balls” if you want to get into the game – and we’re not talking about baseballs and bats. We’re talking search engine robots and human eyeballs, which you need to attract to be a player in your business.

While human eyeballs like a compelling story, both are attracted by the right keywords. To grab them, you’ll need to have a plan and a process to make sure you follow it. Let’s walk through the steps.

1. Develop and document your SEO strategy. What are the specific pages you want to drive your website visitors to, and what action do you want them to take? Answering these questions should help you align your SEO – and any other digital marketing efforts you undertake – with your business goals.
2. Choose the right keywords – Part 1. While we have all sorts of analytic tools to determine keywords for all types of searches, there’s also an art to selecting the right ones. Your artistry will depend on knowing the words and phrases that resonate with the people you want to attract and the terms they are likely to use when looking for your product or service. But don’t forget about those search engine bots; they’re driven by science, so here’s where art meets science in very real terms.
3. Choose the right keywords – Part 2. Your keywords need to take on the voice of your customer or prospect. People rarely enter just a noun for their searches. They add more context, such as best, cheapest, or fastest. They may add another characteristic, such as geographical location. Their goal is to get the most focused results they can so they can make a decision faster. Your goal needs to focus on presenting the best info you can to meet their specific needs.
4. Develop and document a content strategy. It’s easy to overlook this step, but it’s important to let anyone who speaks on your behalf know what’s best to say. Content stretches across so many platforms, including the words and images on your website, blogs and newsletters, public relations campaigns, and all forms of social media. A documented content strategy will let your employees and ambassadors know the best messages to convey in words and images.
5. Keep your eye on the clock. People look at content within time spans that can range from a few seconds to many minutes. If you follow these guidelines, you should be able to maximize your impact:
   1. 7 Seconds – for tweets, headlines and soundbites
   2. 2 Minutes – for web pages, blog posts, news releases (about 400 words each), and infographics
   3. 5 Minutes – for a 1,000-word article or a video
   4. 20 Minutes – for white papers, speeches, and e-books (about 4,000 words each)

Grabbing “bots & balls” requires you to look at SEO and content as complementary marketing tools, not silos. Good management practices include periodic audits to make sure your goals and strategies are working and having the capability to adjust your program to improve your results.

NicheLabs is positioned to help you attract search engine robots and human eyeballs. As a digital marketing agency, we can serve as your CMO (chief marketing officer) to help you develop and execute coordinated marketing campaigns that encompass SEO and content production, including website design, search engine optimization and marketing (SEO/SEM), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), email marketing, blog posts, newsletters and public relations. If you’d like to start a conversation now, we invite you to contact us at 888-978-9254, or by sending an email using our website contact form. We love to talk about marketing, best practices for SEO programs, brand messaging and content strategy.