In this turbulent digital marketing landscape, where things are constantly changing at an astonishing rate, one thing remains the same – search engines are still a major source of traffic. Namely, studies point out that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
This is why all businesses operating online, irrespective of their size and industry, need to build a killer website. This is usually not enough, given that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engine results pages. To reach your target audiences, boost traffic and get more link juice, you need to have a bulletproof SEO strategy.
However, SEO is a pretty complex field and, as such, it usually turns out to be the Achilles’ heel for many inexperienced webmasters. A lot of variables, metrics and tools come into play and, if you don’t know which ones to stick to and which you can safely ignore, you might end up failing.
We all know that keyword research, on-page SEO, content marketing and link building are the pillars of every effective SEO strategy. But how to take them to the next level?
1. Keyword research is the basis of your SEO strategy
Keyword analysis is the starting point of every powerful SEO campaign. It tells you what phrases to target and helps you learn more about your potential consumers, Toronto SEO Geek is an SEO provider with a different approach but you could definitely get an advice from them about this. This way, you will not only know which keywords are relevant in your industry, but also focus on the ones your target audience is actually searching for.
Here are several techniques that will help you predict the shift in keyword demand and provide your readers with the content they are interested in.
Start with seed keywords
As they define your niche and help you find out who your competitors are, seed keywords are the backbone of your keyword research. Of course, your main aim is not to create a final list of keywords. Instead, you just want to think of the phrases your potential customers might use to search for particular content.
Collect keyword ideas
Generating your seed keywords is just the tip of the keyword analysis iceberg. Once you figure them out, you need to collect all relevant keyword ideas to understand what people in your niche are searching for. Here is how to do so:
- See what keywords you already rank for. If your website has been around for a while, it is already ranking for a few hundred keywords. For starters, you need to identify these keywords. ‘Search Analytics’ in Google Search Console highlights your average rating for each of the keywords you rank for, and shows you how many clicks it drives.
- See which keywords your competitors are ranking for. This is the Swiss knife of your keyword research. Maybe your competitors have already done a thorough keyword analysis for you. So, you can look for the keywords they rank for and cherry-pick the most engaging ones.
- Use keyword research tools. To be a leader in your niche, you should not only do competitor analysis, but also search for unique keywords none of your competitors are targeting. To get better keyword ideas, and save a lot of time on manual research, you should automate this process with keyword research tools.
Rank for keywords that bring value to your site
Not every high-volume keyword you bump into is the right one to rank for. Before you commit to it, you need to consider what the intent behind its search is. Remember, you need to rank for keywords that drive more traffic to your site and boost your leads and conversion rates.
2. Engaging content is the Holy Grail of your SEO
Now that you know your keywords, you need to build some content around them. This is definitely the most significant aspect of your SEO campaign. Statistics support this statement, highlighting that 72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic.
To create valuable content and deliver it to the right people, through the right channels, you need to build a powerful content marketing strategy. This will keep you on track and help you establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
- Create content that answers popular questions. Either an article or a video, your content needs to give answers to the hottest industry-related questions. The trick is to look for the questions that have been asked many times and that haven’t been answered so far. You could start your research on Q&A sites, such as Quora and Reddit.
- Cover trending topics with intelligent insights. Keep track of industry trends, analyse what’s creating a lot of buzz at the moment and figure out where and how to make use of a particular topic.
- Make your content easy to read. To create an easily digestible and to-the-point piece of content, you need to optimise it adequately for readers. For instance, separate articles into logical sections, use white spaces to prioritise your content, avoid overly complex sentences, offer bullet points and numbered lists, remove pop-ups, etc.
- Implement interactive content, such as infographics, images, slideshows, gifs and memes. Namely, 37% of marketers emphasise visual marketing as the most prominent form of content for their company.
- Implement video marketing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what could we say about videos? Studies show that 4X as many users would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
- Share your content via multiple channels, including social media, sponsored ads, email and live video platforms. To encourage your readers to share the posts, integrate social buttons and make them instantly visible to your readers.
3. Leverage intelligent on-page optimisation
Over the past few years, on-page SEO rules have changed dramatically. Emphasis is now placed on the contextualisation of content and the semantic aspects of the page. Put simply, as Google is getting smarter every day, your on-page optimisation strategies need to be smart as well.
Include your main keywords in your page’s title tag.
A title tag is one of the most significant on-page ranking factors. It is displayed in SERP as a clickable headline for a certain result. As it represents a concise description of a page’s content, it plays a fundamental role in SEO, social sharing and overall usability. To create a perfect title tag, you need to:
- Mind its length. It should be up to 60 characters.
- Write for your customers. It’s the first level of interaction between your brand and your target audience and, as such, it needs to be organic.
- Include your brand name in the title to boost CTR.
- Use the most important keywords in the title tag, but don’t overdo it.
Have a descriptive, but concise URL
URLs are important for boosting user experience and ranking in SERP. Precisely because of this, they need to be simple, relevant and semantically accurate. To make them easily readable, use lower case letters and use hyphens. On the other hand, you should avoid underscores, spaces and similar characters.
Come up with a unique domain name
One of the main aims of Google’s algorithm is to fight keyword-rich, exact-match domains. To comply with Google’s standards, you need to avoid non-.com top-level domains, as well as choose a name that is short and memorable. Most importantly, never use keywords in the domain name unless they seem completely organic.
Boost page speed
Studies show that 40% of users would abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Of course, constantly rising bounce rate might heavily affect your SEO efforts. To prevent this from happening, you should enable compression, reduce JavaScript, CSS and HTML, cut redirects, optimise images, boost server response time and take advantage of browser caching.
4. Build smart links
Google claims that we should stop building links, but research tells us the opposite. Namely, 64% of marketers claimed that more than 25% of their SEO work is dedicated to securing links. Given this fact, it’s obvious that links are still a big deal. The only thing that has changed is the way we build them.
To take advantage of some basic, white hat, link-building strategies, you should start a blog, get listed in trustworthy directories, build relationships with niche-related communities, give testimonials and post quality articles on industry-relevant sites. However, if you want to make the most of your link building efforts, here are several interesting moves you should consider.
- Identify and fix your broken links by either asking the linking site to update the link, or simply setting up a 301 redirect. You could also find your competitors’ broken links on authoritative sites and offer your resource as an alternative.
- Remove all harmful links. Not only don’t spammy links work, they are also dangerous for your entire SEO campaign. This is why you should check your link profile for any suspicious links (links in foreign languages, links with odd anchor text, links that have no relevance to your niche) and reach out to the webmasters, requesting removal. If all else fails, you can always disavow the links with Google’s disavow tool.
- Use interlinking to build a content hierarchy and make it easier for Google to index your pages. This will boost your website navigation, direct your readers to the content they are interested in, reduce bounce rate and, most importantly, pass link juice to pages with lower PA.
Crucial SEO tips – conclusion:
Even though ranking high in SERP is immensely important, you should never forget that the main idea behind your digital marketing strategy is to create value for the user. Hopefully, with the SEO tips listed above, you will maximise every aspect of your SEO strategy and, therefore, boost user experience, generate more leads and improve conversion rates.
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