We’ve seen a lot of people increase their SEO budgets this year, which isn’t surprising, as it’s a significant piece of your marketing puzzle. I’ve been using my keyword research to help me identify content hub themes every month. With so many pages driving to one another, you’ll start to gain a lot of trust and authority from Google, which will help your SEO efforts. Although rules and tactics have changed over the years, the heart of SEO still revolves around content and links. Without great content, you’ll never get links, so if you’re looking for a place to get started, create that amazing content. Optimize for mobile Have you heard of Google’s mobile-first index? This makes sense from a customer experience standpoint as the majority of Google searches are done on a mobile device these days. So, while us marketers have been talking about video for years now, it’s time to really get serious about it. Not only is it easy to use and embed on your site, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and it’s owned by Google, which, from an SEO standpoint is a major plus (have you started seeing YouTub videos appear in Google Image search yet?). Be a guest on a podcast I talked about this topic earlier this year but believe in the power of it, so I thought I’d revisit the topic, although you don’t commonly hear about it as a best practice for SEO.
We’re almost halfway through the year (what?!), which makes it a good time to start taking a look at what’s working as it relates to your SEO efforts so that you can plan accordingly moving forward. We’ve seen a lot of people increase their SEO budgets this year, which isn’t surprising, as it’s a significant piece of your marketing puzzle.
Here are the SEO tactics that seem to be working thus far.
Master keyword research
The importance of keyword research hasn’t changed over the years, but how we approach them has.
Your keyword strategy is the driver behind your content efforts (and in turn, your SEO efforts). Keywords should be used to identify user intent and search behavior.
Focusing your content on long-tail keywords gives you a better chance to match the intent of the person searching for you.
I’ve been using my keyword research to help me identify content hub themes every month.
Content hubs are fully foundational pages that have tremendous amounts of value about what the theme is, with blogs and other resources that people can click through to for further information.
I not only have internal pages driving back to this one hub page, I also include links to external, high-quality content on the page that can also be linked back to the hub page.
With so many pages driving to one another, you’ll start to gain a lot of trust and authority from Google, which will help your SEO efforts.
Think about the context of your content
As many marketers know at this point, Google’s primary job is to provide people with an excellent user experience, and because of this, they want to make sure their users get the best possible content provided to them based on the search criteria they’re looking for.
Gone are the days that you can just skim over a given topic. Today, you must take a deep dive into what you’re trying to cover so that a user can get all of the information they’re looking for in one place.
I’ve seen people say your post needs to be 2,000 words to be effective, however, I say use as many words as necessary to get your point across thoroughly. What’s worse than not hitting 2,000 words, is rambling on about nothing for the last 1,000 of those words. Think quality over quantity.
Focus on link-building
When I talk to marketers I often hear that one of their biggest challenges is link building, and because of this, putting a strong effort towards it is often put on the backburner, but this is a big problem.
Although rules and tactics have changed over the years, the heart of SEO still revolves around…
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