Given the sheer amount of online searches that take place each day, it’s not surprising that each and every business wants to appear at the very top of search results. But it’s easier said than done, it requires you to have proper search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies in place first.
Let’s start 2022 off the right way, by ensuring our SEO is in its finest form. The best way to use SEO is to strip it back to its basics… and try not to get confused with the abundance of IT words you’ll see along the way.
Need to optimise your brand’s website and climb to the top of Google? Leave it to the experts. Get in touch with Framework Marketing here.
Target Keywords
First things first, you’ll want to identify your target keywords. Developing an SEO strategy that aligns with your business goals would include identifying your target keywords – i.e a word or phrase that best summarizes your brand or website.
Digital marketing agencies like Framework Marketing can help you find and whittle down your keywords that are most relevant to your business and in turn will be the most helpful when people search for products or services like yours.
Narrowing down on your target keywords is the first step towards building your detailed content strategy, they will each act as a guide to help you create valuable content specifically targeted to your audience.
However, one thing you may want to jot down is to not over do it. Using too many keywords can actually hinder the success of your SEO. This is something called keyword stuffing (and yes I did just think about Christmas dinner), where you cram your website with the same target words in a race to get to the top of the page.
It’s generally known that 1-3 keywords work well for optimizing your website’s content, and that’s all you really need!
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Develop your Content Strategy
None of this is any good though without a solid content strategy. The search engine’s class favourites are websites that are updated with fresh and high quality content on a regular basis. Therefore we can draw the conclusion that the key to developing a content strategy that increases the amount of traffic to your site is to create content you know is fully optomised for search.
Remember though, not everything needs to be posted – not all content is content. A rule you may want to follow is to create and publish content that will genuinely help your brand build its awareness and also its authority over given topics. The aim of SEO is to be perceived as the best in your field, you want to be seen as an expert, as a business that can provide advice and service to its customers. Not someone who publishes anything and everything.
Once you’ve established your area of expertise, or the niche topics you know you are fully qualified to talk about, we can branch out into your content strategy. We delve into how to build your content strategy and what it needs in other blog posts on our site, which you can read here.
Recognise that different parts of the sales funnel require different types of content, audiences needs do differ and you’ll want to ensure that you can cater to whatever the customer needs.
Even simply having a blog can put your business in a position of expertise, and if you are reading this right now it only backs my point further. A blog fills your website with high quality content that is relevant to your site’s visitors and often includes your brand’s keywords without even thinking about it.
In return, the blog will help your brand to build more authority and rank higher in search results. And as an added bonus, you can then promote this across your other social media platforms and advertising – further linking traffic back to your site.
Link-Building
Another key element for making SEO successful is to implement link-building tactics. One of the main ways that search engines like Google rank the quality of your site’s content is through backlinks, also known as “inbound” links. A link building strategy is the practice of gaining links back to your website, improving your authority as well as your search engine rankings.
Simply put, these are links from another domain that will take a user to one of your webpages. Any website with higher quality backlinks from other relevant and trustworthy sources tend to rank higher in search results.
This links back to blog posts (pardon the pun), as they are a great way to attract high-quality backlinks, as well as the creation of useful or interesting content. It’s important to focus on the quality of your backlinks rather than the quantity, and you’ll want to ensure that the ones you attract from other sites are relevant to your industry – otherwise it is a bit pointless.
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Recycling existing content
Not only does a blog provide a lot of SEO value but it is also an easy way to keep your website current and up to date. Unfortunately, not every blog post us bloggers write gets the visibility that you want, therefore it is important to take the time to revamp our older blog posts that performed very well to make them relevant and valuable once again.
This can be done by updating the blog’s information, researching further to see if there are any advances on the information you’ve already published or even by adding new images.
This is beneficial for two reasons: it will extend the survival of your content and will further optimise your website while adding to the existing SEO value that your content has accumulated over time. According to SEO Tribunal, refreshing old blog posts can increase organic search traffic to your site by up to 112%.
Of course there are many ways to improve the SEO of your site and reach higher rankings on those tricky search engines, these are just a few steps that can help you along the way. If researched correctly, and your content is tailored both to your brand and your audience, your SEO will be sorted in no time!
