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Written by: Peter Minkoff
Ever since the internet became widely available and people started the web to solve their daily problems, using search engine optimization to bring the companies closer to their end-users instantly became one of the most effective and lucrative digital marketing channels available.
These days, when a staggering 93% of online experiences start with a search engine and the first organic result the consumers stumble upon earning as much as 32.5% organic traffic, ranking your company’s website as high as possible becomes one of the most critical business priorities.
However, all these things are hardly a hidden knowledge and SEO has, by now, become one of the most competitive marketing arenas in the world. With the things as they are, standing out from the crowd and scoring strong SERP results means bringing your SEO game to the next level.
Let’s see what we can do about that.
Look at the things from the readers’ perspective
Search Engine Optimization is a highly technical form of marketing. But, while they are navigating this complex world of keywords, crawlers, headlines, and metadata, the marketers often forget that, when all is said and done, the SEO strategies will be only as effective as the content is capable of drawing in the audience and keeping the readers engaged. So, as a first step on the road to making your SEO efforts more effective try putting yourself in the readers’ shoes and see how you can make the content more appealing, provide more value to the reader, and solve the specific problems the readers may be facing.
Leverage the power of voice search
Even though it was always embedded in the public consciousness, for quite some time it looked like the IoT never truly fulfilled its true potential. Well, not until the people started stacking their households with IoT-powered devices capable of performing web searches and started using this incredibly powerful functionality to a greater extent. That brings us to the present-day market in which 41% of adults are using voice search at least once per day and the sales of voice search-ready devices like speakers will surpass $30 billion. Keeping these facts in mind, voice search definitely deserves much closer attention.
Base your decisions on real-life data
Effective decision-making requires a good understanding of your company's KPIs, market position, competition, and other relevant internal and external factors. That is why you should do your best to invest more resources into the assets that will give you a better insight into this critical data and find a way to make this info public for all parties involved in the SEO process. For instance, once you finish the research using some platform for creating white label SEO reports that should put complex data into the framework that can be used in all facets of the company. The more transparent you are the, better.
Take into account the role of social media
After all, social media platforms are the place where your posts will get the most shares and a huge portion of online traffic. Be sure then to take into account all the requirements and benefits associated with these public forums. You can start by making the headlines, introductions, and topics more shareable and optimizing images for the necessities of each platform. Once finished, you can start improving brand cred through communication with the followers, boosting branded search traffic, building professional relationships with influencers, and immediately publishing new posts to make them indexed faster.
Set up a strategy for internal linking
Internal linking makes one of the core activities of search engine optimization. With that in mind, it comes off as a real surprise that most companies do perform this critical process without any purpose-driven strategy leaving so much untapped potential on the table. You can avoid this mistake by abiding by the following principles:
- Identify your website’s hub pages and build the linking infrastructure around them
- Use the internal link to build sensible topic clusters
- Leverage the posts with established authority to boost weaker performers
- Use links to increase the traffic of targeted pages
- Use the relevant anchor text to make the internal website traffic more organic
Setting measurable and tangible goals that will use the strategies above can only make your efforts worthwhile.
Put more focus on long-tail keywords
Last but not least, we would like to remind you that, at the moment, most marketers prefer to focus their efforts on exact, relevant keywords that generate excellent traffic and lure in a very vast number of possible clients. However, quantity does not always translate to quality, and putting a greater focus on the more specific long-tail keywords that maybe don't have such a broad appeal but definitely provide access to more qualified and prospective leads. Going all hyper-targeted and using the name of your native city or even the neighborhood where your business is located can only produce stronger results.
We hope these few mentions gave you a general idea about the strategies you can use to make your future SEO efforts more focused, streamlined, and overall more effective. Keeping in mind the sheer scale of the traffic that gets ignited by the search engines each and every second, trying to perform any kind of sensible digital marketing campaign without leveraging the power of SEO seems impossible. But, even these efforts won't produce desired results if they are not utilized in an efficient and fruitful manner. That is not an easy task but now, you know where to start.