Modern SEO Strategy: Three Tactics To Support Your Efforts

Modern SEO Strategy: Three Tactics To Support Your Efforts

30-second summary:
If your search strategy hasn’t evolved to account for algorithm updates, then you’re probably not seeing the returns you want.
Your website won’t become an authoritative digital property overnight; it takes time and effort to master modern SEO and earn that clout. 
Nick Chasinov, founder and CEO of Teknicks, shares three tactics you can use to support your SEO strategy this year.

SEO is alive and well, but it has definitely changed over the years. If your search strategy hasn’t evolved to account for algorithm updates, then you’re probably not seeing the returns you want. After all, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO. The best strategies are continually reassessed and refined overtime to meet unique organizational objectives. Agility will serve you better than a comprehensive plan, especially right now amid the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s not to say there aren’t guidelines for modern SEO. Your approach should include a steady stream of fresh, high-quality content (including well-written long-form content that adds real value to customers), a strong branding strategy, an exceptional user experience that highly meets the needs of visitors, and a strong backlink portfolio. Above all else, your strategy should prioritize your visitors’ experiences.

Why, if you may ask?

Google ultimately ranks websites by how useful they are to a user’s search. The search giant doesn’t usually reveal its search statistics (even though many have attempted to estimate), but Google disclosed in 2012 that the year held 1.2 trillion searches across 146 languages. The majority of your website’s traffic most likely comes from Google, so you need to meet its ever-evolving set of ranking criteria. Sure, other search engines matter too, but considering the second-largest is the Google subsidiary YouTube, it’s safe to base your SEO strategies on Google’s standards.

Take it slow

Your website won’t become an authoritative digital property overnight; it takes time and effort to master modern SEO and earn that clout. Traditional factors like quality backlinks, positive user engagement, optimized on-page elements, and stellar content still all contribute to your website’s credibility and rank over time, so don’t look for quick fixes. Stick the process and you will see results.

Don’t worry if you haven’t been keeping up with recent algorithm changes. Even seasoned marketers can feel out of the SEO loop sometimes, especially when myths and speculations regarding algorithm updates spread online. These updates are real — Google announced a core algorithm update on May 4, after all — but you don’t need to worry. Just make sure you aren’t doing something that’s hurting rather than helping your brand’s website. Google will penalize you for spammy guest blogs, keyword-stuffed content, unnatural link building, and everything designed to unethically manipulate rankings. Simply put, Google wants you to earn your rank.

With so much to focus on, how do you prioritize your efforts? Luckily, Google lays it all out for us: Focus on the user’s experience. Build trust and credibility with Google and the people visiting your site.

Becoming an online authority means prioritizing not only what’s important to you, but also what’s important to the people you want to reach. Here are three tactics you can use to support your modern SEO strategy this year:

1. Create a thoughtful FAQ page

In a crisis, your strengths and weaknesses are spotlighted as a brand. People observe what you do and how you do it, and that will inevitably affect their opinions. This is especially true during the coronavirus pandemic. According to Edelman’s recent report, only 38% of respondents believe that businesses are doing well at putting people before profits. Your customers, clients, and consumers are humans, and they’ve craving comfort and connection right now. Prioritize the user experience with a frequently asked questions webpage.

Everyone knows what an FAQ page is, but not everyone knows that it can be your best friend when it comes to optimizing your website for search. Having a thoughtful, helpful FAQ page shows that you care about your customers and search engines like businesses that care about their customers.

Plus, a robust FAQ page that’s marked up properly might receive a rich result on the search and action on the Google Assistant, dramatically expanding your reach.

2. Organize content by topic

It is no surprise that internet usage is up. In fact, Comcast, the largest residential internet network in the U.S., has experienced a 285% increase in videoconferencing and VoIP use while people are quarantined at home. More people are streaming, searching, shopping, teaching, learning, meeting, and gaming online than ever before. This is your opportunity to meet the needs of users by organizing your content by topic.

When it comes to the amount of content displayed on a given webpage, don’t lose sleep over the word count. Adding value and being helpful doesn’t require a set number of words or characters. Just keep writing until you feel the content highly meets the needs of your users. You’ll end up with an article that Google will love.

Don’t pack tons of information across an array of topics onto a single page. Instead, focus on providing an exceptional user experience by ensuring individual pages are each dedicated to a unique topic. You’ll want to start this process by building out a content map to define the information architecture. As you gradually add pages and remove others, make sure your content map reflects these modifications.

3. Get the tools you need to help with link building

When outreaching and creating content for link building and brand mentions, you’ll need to be helpful and human. It’s not just about hyperlinks — it’s about building relationships and providing value. During the coronavirus pandemic, let compassion guide this element of your strategy. Selectively reach out to domains with effective, modern content that audiences will find useful. There’s no better time to demonstrate your knowledge and support your audience.

Link building is a critical part of the most effective SEO strategies. Just keep in mind that this is generally a long-term tactic, so you’ll have a hard time executing without some help. Luckily, there is plenty of software available to do the heavy lifting for you. The quickest and easiest place to start is Google’s own search console, which offers tools and reports to improve your website’s search presence. This service will show you which websites link to yours and confirm that Google can both find and crawl your site.

As search engines learn more about users’ behaviors, they will continue to change. What was a widely accepted SEO best practice just a few years ago may now hurt more than help your goals.

The bottom line

You can’t predict what Google or any other search engine will do with its algorithm, but luckily, that’s not your job. Your job is to adapt, evolve, and do what’s best for your business and your customers.

Nick Chasinov is the founder and CEO of  Teknicks, a research-based internet marketing agency certified by Google in Analytics, Tag Manager, and a Google Premier AdWords partner.



How To Overhaul Your SEO Strategy For Just $50

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Last year, 61 percent of marketers said improving search engine optimization (SEO) and growing their organic presence was their top inbound marketing priority. Do you know why? Because it's budget-friendly and impactful.

While platforms like Google and Facebook give your business the ability to reach millions of new and existing users, it may cost you a pretty penny to do so. SEO utilizes the content you already have (or are creating) and search engine algorithms to get people on your site without you having to pay anyone to get them there.

However, SEO is competitive and it's hard to make your web pages stand out without the proper tools and training. Long Tail Pro will help give you and your business an edge.

Long Tail Pro helps you find less competitive keywords that can still garner tons of high-converting traffic online, regardless of your niche. When you first download the program, it'll give you a personal domain analysis and customized keyword competitiveness targets to give you an idea of where to start with your SEO strategy.

Then, you can search for keywords manually and get hundreds of suggestions for each keyword search, helping you figure out what people are searching for and how you might get them to your site. Additionally, Long Tail Pro lets you perform search engine result page lookups to understand what's ranking for a given search term and allow you to do detailed competition analysis for each keyword. It'll even give you a peek into your competitors' SEO strategy to see what they're doing.

Long Tail Pro also has a Rank Value feature that helps you estimate the monthly value of ranking #1 for each keyword, so you can see where your resources are best spent.

Give your SEO strategy a boost. Right now, you can get lifetime access to Long Tail Pro with up to 10,000 keywords for just $49.99

Prices are subject to change.

Related:

How to Overhaul Your SEO Strategy for Just $50

How Much Time Should You Be Spending on the Google Algorithm Update?

This $25 Tool Might Be the SEO Magic Weapon Your Site Needs



9 SEO Tips That Can Improve A Website’s Google Ranking

If you want more visitors to your website, one of the first things you’ll want to do is improve your website’s ranking on Google. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO). It is a crucial element of managing a successful website or online store.

Many things have been said about SEO, including that it is more luck than skill or that it’s a pay-to-play system, where the highest-paying sites get the best visibility. Neither of these is true.

In this article, we will provide you with several basic steps you can take to improve your SEO strategy and ensure that your website is shown prominently on Google searches.

What are organic results?

When someone makes a Google search, they are shown two types of results: paid results and organic results.

Paid results are those from websites that have paid Google directly for their website to be shown above organic results. Studies have shown that while this is one way to increase traffic to your site, Google users prefer to click on organic results.

Organic results are not paid for and are determined by a variety of factors, including the page’s content and metadata, and how closely these relate to the search query. Therefore, the goal of SEO is to increase the number of organic results that lead to visits to your website.

How search engines determine what pages to show and how to show them is complicated and goes well beyond this article’s scope. However, a few essential points should be made.

First, search engines use bots or computer programs to trawl the web, following links and visiting all publicly accessible websites. They then use this information to build enormous indexes that are consulted each time an internet user performs a Google search.

Once a user has entered a query, the search engine will refer to these extensive indexes, incorporating tens or hundreds of different factors into complex ranking algorithms. These, in turn, determine what content to display on the search results page. PageRank, Google’s preferred algorithm, relies on over 200 different metrics to determine Google search rankings.

You can leverage these hundreds of metrics to improve your website’s Google ranking. Although we won’t be able to look at all 200, we’ll discuss the most important ones.

9 steps to success

Let’s look at nine essential steps that you can take to improve your website’s Google ranking.

1. Creating a sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your website’s search rankings. This will enable Google’s bots to quickly and efficiently index your entire site, and it will ensure that no pages are missing (and cannot be found through Google searches). You can submit a sitemap file to Google via their Webmasters website.

2. Make sure you provide the necessary information to bots with a robots.Txt file. More information is available on this website, but basically, keeping on the bots’ good side is one of the best things you can do to ensure your website features prominently in Google searches.

3. Here’s a simple one: Delete duplicate content. Search engine bots hate duplication, and it’s one of the easiest ways to see your site tumble down the Google search rankings. Some website managers think that creating pages designed to detect search engine bots is a good idea, but it will backfire and hurt your website’s SEO rankings.

4. Although less crucial than in the past, it still helps to create static versions of your webpages. Static content is more easily interpreted by search engine bots, at least more efficiently than dynamic content.

5. Create permalinks for your pages using keywords (for example: “/products/fridges/dynatech-coolfreezepro/”). These will result in better search rankings than permalinks containing mostly numbers or other random information. A good rule of thumb is that the more identifiable data you can provide the bot, the better.

6. An organized website with clear internal linking architecture will have higher Google rankings. This means displaying important information on the homepage and ensuring that similar content is grouped together on dedicated pages. A menu such as the one below makes it easy for search engine bots to index your site.

Example: www.Mysite.Com/news/products/category-1/category-2/blog/about/contact.

7. When creating text-based content, use keywords that your audience is likely to search for. These should be used throughout your text (don’t overdo it, though) and featured in the title of your article and its permalink. And remember, search engine bots can’t read images or text. If your site posts have many pictures, videos, or screenshots of text, add captions or descriptions that bots will be able to interpret.

8. Make sure your keywords are related to your business objectives. If you don’t know which ones are most relevant to your field, look them up. Finding the right keywords is essential if you want to feature prominently on Google searches.

9. One of the main ways that Google and other search engines rank content is by the number of sites that link to yours. If your webpages are frequently mentioned on other websites, your site will quickly begin shooting up the Google rankings. However, this is not always simple, and entire businesses exist to increase the number of inbound links to your website.

Time to call an SEO expert?

While the advice in this article will undoubtedly help you improve your website’s Google rankings, there’s only so much that you can do yourself. SEO agencies or experts have worked in this field for years and have an intuitive understanding of search engine algorithms.

Trustworthy SEO agencies will provide results-based testimonials that show how they improved a business’s SEO and Google rankings. However, be wary of SEO experts promising top-ranking Google results or radical increases in traffic to your site. Real SEO is a process of gradual improvement rather than overnight success.

A final point worth making is that when it comes to SEO, money can only get you so far. An in-house SEO strategy or a trustworthy SEO agency can certainly help you improve your Google search ranking. But the only guaranteed way to do this is to create high-quality content. Without that, even the best SEO strategy will only get you so far.