Author: Shane Barker / Source: The Next Web
When done right, SEO can help you improve SERP rankings, increase targeted traffic to your website, and drive more sales. But how do you create an effective SEO strategy that can help you achieve that kind of success? It’s way more complex than choosing a few keywords or fixing bugs on your website.
Google, the undisputed leader in the global search engine market, regularly makes changes to their search algorithms to improve user experience. Unfortunately, that makes it even more difficult for brands to ensure that they hold a decent rank in search results.
The bottom line is that, in order to rank on page one of Google, you need to optimize your website for these updates. In this post, I’ll discuss 12 of the most important pillars of SEO that can help you get the best results.
Understand your brand’s needs
You need an SEO strategy that aligns with the goals you want to achieve, the audience you target, and the competitors you want to beat. You also need to make sure that you’re well aware of the latest SEO trends.
While this might seem daunting, it isn’t. You just need to have a clear understanding of your brand’s primary goals. Better information can help you make more result-oriented decisions. To get a better understanding of your brand’s needs, determine:
- How are you performing in the SERPs now?
- Who is your target audience? What do they search for?
- Who are your competitors? What are they doing well?
It will help you come up with a focused, result-driven SEO strategy.
Perform an SEO audit
With a thorough SEO audit, you can check your website for its strengths and weaknesses.
This includes checking:- If your website has a good design – easy navigation, good user experience, readability, etc
- If there are any bugs that can impact crawling or site load speed
- If you’ve been hit with any penalties from Google
- If you’re performing well in SERPs for targeted keywords
- If the backlinks to your site are coming from high DA, trustworthy sites
- If your site’s content is optimized for conversions
Once you can identify the flaws in your current SEO strategy, you can uncover the best opportunities to improve performance and results. However, you need to prioritize issues that have greater impact your site’s SEO performance.
Optimize for Google’s RankBrain algorithm
RankBrain is an AI-powered processing algorithm that uses machine learning to filter through millions of search results. It helps Google deliver the most relevant search results that match users’ search queries.
RankBrain is smart enough to quickly devalue your content for keyword stuffing. In order to optimize your content for Google’s RankBrain algorithm, you need to create unique, genuine, and informative content that provides value to your target audience.
This algorithm also values user satisfaction. If a page has a number of social shares or comments, it can boost their rankings in search results. It closely monitors how users interact with your content by observing your organic click-through rate, bounce rate, and read time.
Find and target the right keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that people are searching for. They also help search engines like Google understand what your content is about. Getting your keywords right makes it easier for Google to list your content in response to related searches.
Previously, brands focused on stuffing their content with the most searchable keywords to push their content to the top in SERPs. But Google now uses smart algorithms that penalize sites for keyword stuffing. So you need to sprinkle your keywords in such a way that they sound natural.
When you perform keyword research, you need to find and prioritize keywords based on their relevance, demand, and competition.
Optimize your content with a mix of local keywords, branded keywords, long-tail keywords, and short-tail keywords. Try to choose the ones that have low competition yet high search volumes.
Apart from your content, you’ll need to include keywords in titles, meta descriptions, URLs, headings, alt texts, and social media posts.
Create great content
Great content lays the foundation of SEO. Google values high-quality content that answers user queries effectively and meets their content guidelines.
In a recent update on August 1, 2018, Google announced that their new algorithm would favor web pages that have a high level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). Such pages are likely to rank better in SERPs.
This update primarily targeted the YMYL – Your Money Your Life niche. And punished several sites that provide advice on finances, health, or happiness, but had low E-A-T scores. As a result of this update, countless sites have recorded a drop in their rankings while others have moved up.
Google now considers E-A-T parameters for content, website, as…
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