You have a lot of information floating around, and not a lot of time to capture anyone’s attention. Therefore, if you need individuals to notice you online, whether you are a solo artist, in marketing, or just beginning a blog, you need to become proficient at knowing what your audience is doing and at making a solid first impression. In essence, you should be good at both information and presentation.
To get to know your audience, it’s helpful to know how they find you online. Examining search engine results pages (SERPs) can provide you with real, actionable data. Yet, a cursory glance at the results won’t be enough. You need a way to capture and organize all that information. One of the most important skills for any online marketer or SEO is being able to export Google search results. It takes the uncooked information from SERPs titles, links, snippets, and more and puts it into a usable format, like a spreadsheet. With this data in hand, you can do more than just scratch the surface. You’re actually able to get into what the competition is doing, monitor how your rankings change over time, find gaps in your content, and even copy what’s working for other people. It enables you to make intelligent decisions from facts, not assumptions.
Why SERP Analysis Is Important
So why go further than a quick skim of the search results? Let’s say you’re tracking a campaign that’s going after five keywords. You might be checking hundreds of results per search each day, with stuff moving around, such as People Also Ask boxes suddenly popping up and ads everywhere. Try to track all that by hand? Forget it, and you’re bound to get something wrong.
The bulk data scraping tools enable you to keep track of things on autopilot. That means you have a record of everything happening in the world of SERPs. Then you can take that data and see how much of the market you have, whether changes you’ve implemented on your site are having a real impact, or find out what searches are showing your site but not getting clicked on (so you need to work on your title tags). It turns the search engine from an opaque entity into a game that you can conquer.
From Good Data to Good Looks
Now that you have the information to know *who’s* visiting your site and *what* they’re searching for, you need to make your online presence make them want to stick around. That’s where visuals come into play. And that’s nothing more important than your profile image. It’s your digital handshake, and it can dictate whether people hang around or click elsewhere.
Your profile picture has a tall order to fill: be professional, convey your personality, and appear well across sites, from a small circle on LinkedIn to a big picture on your blog. A bad picture cut off, blurry, or too distracting is like a site that causes visitors to bounce right away. It undermines the trust and authority you’re trying to build.
Getting Your Digital Look Right
You don’t need a pro photoshoot or crazy Photoshop skills to make a great profile photo anymore. Design software these days has made it easier. The trick is to pick the right photo, good lighting, a good, clear photo of your face, and then use a tool to clean it up and make it look professional.
Think about where you’re posting the picture. A LinkedIn picture might be more appropriate to a simple background and business-style crop. A picture for a blog or portfolio might be appropriate to have a cool colored ring or background that portrays your style. The point is to keep the quality and style of all of your profiles the same so that your online presence is consistent.
That’s where simple tools really help. Something like the Adobe Express profile picture maker makes the hard parts of designing a profile picture easy. It can automatically remove backgrounds, crop your photo to the right size for different sites (those annoying square-to-circle conversions), and add small design touches (like a colored ring) that make your selfie look like a pro headshot.
Strategy Meets Style
Finally, to succeed online is to excel at two things that complement each other. First, you ought to be able to dig into data and sort through your market, your audience, and how you’re doing. Second, you ought to use tools so that your profile picture and other pictures are of high quality, so you make a good first impression.
By getting data about your market and acting on it, then showing a great online presence, you’re making a plan that’s smart and stylish. That’s how you win online, using information to make decisions and design to grab people’s attention.