SEO is evolving all the time, and like every other facet of digital marketing, it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down! While some of the changes that are always in the works may be intrinsically beneficial to your business, if you’re not up to date on the way SEO is developing, you’re certain to fall behind your close competitors. Unless you work in marketing, making sure your SEO strategy is current can feel like a mountain of a task. However, there are various habits you can adopt that will help you assure your SEO is always up to date. Here are a few of the best tips for ensuring effective and up-to-date SEO.
Keep It All Integrated
SEO used to be completely divorced from content marketing, and blogs emphasising the importance of high-quality content weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as SEO services promising to optimise your content, usually through keyword stuffing. While people know better these days, there are still a lot of entrepreneurs who see content marketing and SEO as completely different things. In order to accomplish sustainable marketing, you need to have a fully integrated approach, and your SEO needs to cover every little facet of marketing. This means that you’re thinking about the way your target market is searching throughout your entire branding scope; social media, blogging, press releases, and even traditional marketing in some cases. The point here is that the topics covered in any given platform should be consistent. You can integrate your marketing more easily with certain tools that can be used to analyse data, and draw conclusions from it. Botify crawler has often been praised as a game changer in this niche. While it’s important to know the kinds of topics your target market are searching for, you must never overlook what your customers are actually interested in learning, and how your content can help them. By integrating social media as part of customer engagement with any of your content, both online and offline, you can become much more intimate with the likes and dislikes of your target market, and plan your future content accordingly.
Use Synonyms, Rather than Keywords Only
Google has evolved massively in recent years in terms of understanding some of the synonyms that commonly go along with keywords. For example, the phrase “inventory management” may be high-volume according to Google AdWords, but the world’s most popular search engine can now also grasp phrases like “inventory software” or “inventory control”. Previously, people creating content needed to find a perfect text URL, and then use it to link back to certain sites, or certain pages of their blog. Today, the situation is almost completely reversed. Google knows when you’re trying to pin down that exact match. If you wind up doing it too often, it will appear as if you’re trying too hard. You should start using keywords for only around 20 to 30 percent of all your link anchors, and using brand names, or even a phrase like “learn more” or “click here” for the remaining proportion. Google will now recognise the synonyms tied to each keyword phrase, and see it in context, getting some idea of what the content is talking about in a given page. The take-home point here is that you can’t afford to write content intended solely for the search engine’s algorithms anymore. When you’re writing content for humans, search engines are much more likely to understand, and Google is getting better at this all the time!
Achieve the Right Frequency
Finding an achievable and consistent frequency with your posting is everything in terms of modern SEO. Every brand hoping to make it in the modern arena needs to be constantly creating, publishing, and promoting great content. Integrated social media strategies are obviously a big part of this, as this is among the most effective channels for spreading awareness of the content you’re putting out there. Going back to our first point, you don’t want to fall into the trap of seeing social media as wholly distinct from your SEO plans. By viewing your company’s social media presence as a platform for distribution, where sharable content and, to a certain degree, hashtags are the currency, you’ll add a lot of invaluable support to your overall content marketing efforts. The better the quality, and usefulness of your posts, the better they’ll perform when shared on Facebook, Twitter or any other channel your target market happens to use. Regardless of how good your content is, it’s absolutely crucial to come up with a dependable schedule. This will get more readers into the rhythm of your posts, and hopefully, create excitement in the right circles when something new is coming up. Just don’t make your schedule too demanding, and end up publishing poor-quality content just so you can hit deadlines.
Keep an Eye on the Technical Details
As Google becomes more and more intuitive, it’s still worth noting that there are various technical factors you need to bear in mind. Google’s ultimate aim is to link people up with the things they’re searching for as efficiently as possible, and therefore make it easy for the business owners and content creators providing it. However, until they polish their plans off, a large part of SEO is going to be down to coding and other more “techie” details. You don’t have to enter a distance-learning course, but it can certainly pay to keep yourself familiar with some of the more accessible technical details, and learn how to manipulate them. Using keywords in your URL, coming up with web-friendly headlines, and most importantly of all, load times, are all going to have an impact on how SEO-friendly your site is.
As Google’s algorithm keeps speeding into the future, bear in mind that the purpose is to let consumers form connections, answer their questions, and find the kind of product or service that they’re looking for. Bearing this in mind, and maintaining a strong emphasis on constant improvement, will have your brand well on its way to success!
