If you’re looking to improve your content strategy and SEO (search engine optimisation) rankings this year, then you need to forget all those old-school SEO myths and strategies. An old-school SEO strategy can get you into serious trouble with Google.
Before publishing your next piece of content, think about why and how to use SEO to improve that piece of material. Look at the infographic below of 10 Tips for a successful SEO strategy this year.
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Content Creation
Produce valuable pieces of content! No matter how grand your SEO strategy is, it will not yield any positive results if your content is crap. Quality content is king when it comes to having a solid SEO strategy.
Your content must be credible, exciting and engaging. It must deliver value, satisfy user intent and provide a great user experience. Organisations that use digital marketing, content marketing and other on-page and off-page SEO marketing strategies will eventually improve their user experience and get more leads. The performance of your content and its ROI can be monitored using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Keyword Research
To create relevant content or content with search intent, you need to have a keyword strategy. Select great keywords or topics and use them in your content, blog post, header tags, alt tags, headers, URL, and so on. Avoid duplicate content, keyword stuffing, and any spammy tactics with your keyword phrases.
Using a reputable keyword tool to help you pick the right target keywords (short-tail and long-tail keywords, etc.) and phrases and monitor your keyword ranking is one of the most critical steps in successful search engine optimisation (SEO).
The best keywords for your SEO strategy will likely be long-tail keywords that customers type in Google to discover your product or service. These keywords will consider search intent, relevance, authority, click through rate and search volume.
To choose the right keywords for your content, you need to think about your customer’s search intent. You need to understand the various keyword types and invest in a good keyword research tool and other available SEO tools. Then it would help if you analysed the performance of your competition to know what keywords (especially long-tail keywords) they’re using and how they’re performing and how to outsmart them for the exact keywords. You also need to create the right landing page and link your keywords to the landing page.
Using these ten tips will help you have a reliable evergreen SEO strategy this year and beyond. Click To TweetVoice Search
Voice search is one of the fastest-growing types of search. Devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo impact how we use voice to search for content. Your SEO strategy has to cater for this.
As voice search evolves from voice recognition to voice understanding, Google gets nearer to its aim to transform voice search into “An ultimate mobile assistant that helps you with your daily life so that you can focus on the things that matter.”
Just as voice search algorithms use data, location, and several data points to understand search query and search context, marketers must understand consumers’ behaviour.
Topic Relevance
Topical relevance is the relevance that the content on an entire website has to a particular topic or keyword. It is also called “topical authority”. In SEO, topical relevance is the search engine’s process to determine how relevant a particular web page or website is to a topic or keyword.
When creating or optimising our content, we need to research and tune around topic relevancy, not just relevant keywords alone.
Look at this infographic of 10 Tips for an effective SEO strategy this year. Click To TweetMobile-first Design Approach
Mobile-first design is an approach in which web designers first start product design for mobile devices. This can be done by first sketching or prototyping the web app’s design for the smallest screen and gradually working up to larger screen sizes.
Have a mobile-first approach to creating websites and content. Sites and content not optimised for mobile devices will become obsolete.
Page Speed/Site Speed
Page speed measures the time to load content on a particular web page. It’s easy to get this term confused with other words related to site optimisation, like “site speed,” which refers to the average loading time of more than one sample page on a given site.
If your page/website load time is slow, your SEO will hurt, and your website organic traffic and bounce rate will suffer. So we need to optimise for speed.
Media Optimization
Choose an image or video that relates to the subject matter of your content. If you use stock photos, make sure to pay any required license fees and give proper attribution. Save your images, audio or video in a format search engines can index.
Optimise video and image files on your website for search. A well-optimised video and image file can help your content rank higher in a SERP (search engine result page).
SEO Localization
Ensure you list your business in relevant local business directories and that your details and contact information are up to date.
SEO localisation is the process of translating your website content into a specific locality. It improves the quality of search results for your website users.
Produce great content! No matter how grand your SEO strategy is, it will not yield any positive results if your content is crap. Click To TweetLink Building
Building links (external and internal links) is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation. Therefore, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings.
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. Inbound links, also known as backlinks or external links, are HTML hyperlinks that point from one website to another. For best results, you need to have a link building strategy to help you ensure that you have a good backlink profile.
Avoid broken links, spammy internal or external linking strategies and linking to low-quality sites and content. Be careful with low-quality guest posts and backlinks. Avoid black hat SEO techniques so as not to get penalised by search engine algorithms.
Content Research
The concept is simply analysing content online and developing a unique strategy based on those conclusions that will benefit your company’s long-term growth and help with brand visibility.
Research the content your competitors are producing and the keywords they are ranking. Can you use the insight you derive from your research to create/find better content/keywords?
Conclusion
SEO is critical with all the algorithm updates Google has made in recent times. Using these ten tips will help you have a reliable evergreen SEO strategy this year and beyond.
As an SEO expert, I know first-hand that explaining SEO to non-techie business owners is not easy. Some business owners realise the importance of SEO for their online presence but don’t know how to go about it. Consider outsourcing to SEO experts in Nigeria if you need help creating fresh content or blog content that satisfies user intent and improves organic traffic. We’ll be glad to help.
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