In order for your site to rise up the rankings, your marketing strategy needs to take into account the four pillars of SEO (search engine optimization): technical, user experience, content and link building. As search continues to evolve, adapting your SEO strategy will help you offer the best experience possible to your customers, as well as reaching potentially huge new audiences too.
Focus On Getting The Basics Just Right
While it can be tempting to focus on gaining quick and easy results on Google, your SEO strategy should always start with detailed discovery of your site’s target audiences, user journey, and the most-searched keywords. Understanding how your target customers navigate through your site means you can finetune your website for a more valuable user experience. If pages don’t load quickly, disruptive pop-ups make a consistent appearance, or your site isn’t optimised for mobile users, you’ll soon see your rankings drop off on major search engines. Keeping an eye on these potential barriers to sales is one of the best ways to ensure your customer journey is as streamlined and successful as possible.
Crawling your site regularly to ensure there’s no sticking points for your customers can feel time-consuming. You also need to evaluate your crawl budget if you have a large business website. There are plenty of quality tools available to help support your digital marketing journey, but it can be tricky to know which one to invest in for the best results. Digital Marketing Reviews offer a range of in-depth reviews to help you widen your SEO and digital knowledge without splashing out on an unnecessarily expensive tool.
View Your Site Through Your Customer’s Eyes
Your users should always be the focal point of your SEO strategy. Ensuring your customers can navigate seamlessly through your site effectively drives greater conversion rates. If potential customers land on your site without being shown a clear pathway to follow, there’s a strong chance you’ll lose them to a competitor. To avoid this, it’s important to focus on the reason why your users are searching your site, and what you would like their next potential step to be. Adding clear CTAs and internal links allows your audience to progress through your site as naturally as possible without them having to waste valuable time searching for the pages they’re interested in.
Create Content Your Users Will Want To Read
As Google’s crawlers become more and more sophisticated, many sites have undergone a crackdown on thin content. Focusing on rich content is a key component within your wider strategy, but is especially important when it comes to consistent, best-practice SEO. There’s no use churning out rushed, under-researched articles for the sake of a link or rankings boost. Instead, it’s important to focus on quality pieces that will interest, inform and inspire your audience to learn more.
Consider who you’re writing for, too. If your industry is naturally more technical, the content you’re generating needs to have professional input to ensure it’s factually correct, as well as interesting and engaging. If you’re offering a more well-known product, helping your users understand how and why they can make the most of it will help your site become a more well-rounded information hub, that consumers can use for thought leadership, useful tips and advice.
Balance Your Onsite And Offsite SEO Efforts
No matter how perfect your products are, or how streamlined your website is, if your potential customers can’t easily find your site, you’re not going to see your profits rise. To ensure your visibility in the search engines continues to increase, your SEO strategy should focus your efforts on dedicated outreach and PR as well as on-site optimisation. Building links to your site from choice publications, industry-specific areas and strong customer reviews will have a very positive impact on your brand identity, as well as your SERPS positioning.
