There are many SEO strategies that work, but first, it’s important to understand a few key points before employing them.
SEMrush recently (2021) conducted a study of 600,000+ keywords to see which were the most important ranking factors in 2021.
They rated them from ‘not very important’ to ‘very important’, and the following emerged as the top 5 ranking factors:
- Direct Website Visits
- Time on Site
- Pages Per Session
- Bounce Rate
- Referring Domains
As you can see, while referring domains (links) are still very important, this study appears to indicate that on-page user experience (UX) signals are incredibly important for ranking.
So, whatever strategies you employ, you must factor this in.
What strategies help with UX?
Quality, Actionable Content
”Take a holistic approach to SEO, but remember, SEO is ultimately about the search intent of the searcher and that to rank in the long-term, this must be your top priority. Answer that intent with actionable, useful and engaging content.” - Gareth Daine
The first thing you need to concentrate on, once you have the foundations (on-page, site structure, speed etc.) set up, is your content.
Your first priority should be the user/searcher.
While you, of course, want to optimise your content for search engines, too, the priority should be on answering a person’s search intent.
What problem, or question, do they have that you can help solve or answer?
Before you can answer that, you need to answer one fundamental question.
Who are you targeting?
To understand this, you must know what you’re trying to achieve, or what goals you have for a given piece of content.
If your goal is to rank in Google, then you need to be targeting the right people with your content.
It seems obvious, but it’s something that is often missed.
Target those people or businesses that own websites in your niche or related niches.
Individuals who have the ability to link to you (#5 above, referring domains).
Once you know who you’re creating content for, spend time producing something highly-actionable, in-depth (make sure it answers as many questions on a topic for a given search intent as possible), and helps them solve their problems.
Content Promotion
“People don’t find content by mistake, or by accident. Every content plan needs a complementary promotion plan that combines paid, owned, and earned media.” - Rand Fishkin
One of the most important aspects of content marketing, and indeed, SEO, is content promotion.
There is no point in having a great piece of content if no one knows that it exists.
You need to get as many eyeballs as possible on your content.
This plays directly into the ‘direct website visits’ ranking factor at the number #1 spot in the SEMrush study linked above.
Sites with higher authority consequently gain more traffic, and as a result, have a better chance of getting the top results in Google.
But, if you don’t yet have that authority, you need to get the attention of as many people as possible.
But, not just any people, the right kind of individuals.
Those who will be interested in linking to, engaging with and sharing your content.
Content promotion is critical to any successful content marketing or SEO campaign.
You may have heard this quote before:
“Create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you created.” - Derek Halpern
In other words, spend 4 times as much time promoting your content as you do creating it.
I believe this to be 100% correct.
I’ve personally experienced the power of this, many times, as have many others.
I’ve tested this approach.
This is an approach that top SEOs such as Brian Dean and others advocate.
Do you need to spend several hours every week creating blog posts to rank and create an audience?
The answer is, you don’t.
Why keep creating more content when you can create just one high-quality, hugely valuable content asset per month (or even every 3 months) that many people will want to see, then spend the remaining time promoting that content?
This is an approach many have taken, including Brian Dean, of Backlinko.
He produces a post roughly once every month on average and has a total of just 34 posts on his site which is around 4 or 5 years old.
Because he strategically promotes his content using the 80/20 rule mentioned above, he ranks for highly competitive terms, has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and drives hundreds of thousands visits to his website every month.
All with just 34 posts, created over 4 or so years.
You should always be promoting your content, regardless of when it was written.
Many people fall into the trap of spending a few hours creating a piece of content, share it out on social media a few times (perhaps even schedule a few posts) and then move on to the next piece of content.
I’d suggest that your time would be better spent creating an amazing content asset, then strategically promoting it as if your life depended on it.
Now, when I say ‘as if your life depended on it’, I’m not talking about spamming your link everywhere you can online.
I’m talking about strategically positioning your content in front of as many of the right type of people as possible over a period of time.
Again, your promotion efforts don’t have to occur all in one block of time.
Spending 80% of your time on promotion and link building activities will work wonders for your rankings.
Finally, building genuine, long lasting relationships with people and influencers in your industry is very much a part of this promotion process.
Relationships are essential to long-term success, even where SEO is concerned.
Strong Branding, CRO & Call to Actions
Having a strong brand and clear call to actions to increase engagement and conversions (subscribers, sales, shares, comments etc.) is critical in:
- Increasing Time on Site
- Increasing Pages Per Session
- Reducing Bounce Rate
Focus on making the user take an action that drives them to interact and explore further.
Whether that’s through strategic internal linking, content upgrades (for gaining subscribers), related content, video or many other methods, it’s important to continually test and modify to increase engagement and action on your site.
The more things you can do to keep people on site and taking action, the better your rankings will be.
One key component to this is converting visitors to subscribers.
There are many strategies for doing this, but one of the best is the content upgrade.
This is a gated content asset that is highly related to the piece of content the user is currently reading.
The idea is to offer this piece of downloadable content in exchange for an email address.
Brian Dean, of Backlinko, has an excellent article on content upgrades.
Not only does this help with direct website visits by promoting new content to your list, but it also helps with on-page UX signals if done correctly.
PRO TIP: When mailing your list, if you have your blog page set up correctly, you can increase pages per session, time on site and reduce bounce rate by sending your subscriber traffic to your main blog page showing your latest article at the top. This encourages them to click from that page to the article.
What’s Next
Well, those are just 3 key components to achieving great results with your content marketing and SEO.
There are many, many more things involved in SEO and content marketing, but this should help get you on the right track you can contact seodaddy agency as well.