Search marketing is difficult and time consuming. There is a lot of advice and a lot of it is outdated or flat out does not work. With that I want to share with you 10 search strategies that are easy to implement and are proven to increase search rankings.
Search Engine Marketing Strategies
Content Promotion
If your content is not promoted it does not exist. Creating good content does not help SEO, creating good content and then promoting it helps SEO. If no one knows about your content how will Google know it is good? Promoting your content helps you get links and social shares back to your content and then Google ranks the content high in Google. Focus on promoting your content using good content promotion tools or just relationships you have built. The lowest hanging fruit is email marketing content.
Social Media Marketing
Getting social media signals is a form of a “quality” signal which Google is able to use as part of their algorithm. Basically, if your webpage says “Black Cat” how will Google rank you over the other people who rank for “Black Cat”? They rank webpages with social media shares and backlinks as “good quality content” and the more quality signals you have (again, quality signals are links or social media signals) means you will rank higher.
Having a social media marketing plan to get consumers to share your content on their social channels is very important. Creating good blog content and then sharing on your social channels allows Google to value your site higher and therefore rank it higher.
Removing Duplicate Content
Creating landing pages with the same content but just subtle differences is a 2009 SEO tactic. Remove any duplicate content and make all content at least 80 percent unique. If you cannot make it 80 percent unique then consolidate your pages to remove duplicate content. The Panda updates are so advanced now they can really devalue your site if you have too much duplicate content (around 20 percent).
Removing Bad Backlinks
Using a backlink analysis tool can enable you to look at your backlink profile and disavow any bad backlinks you have. You can export all of your links and disavow any poor quality links you have.
Local Citations Auditing
For businesses especially just starting out you want to build a solid foundation of “no-follow” links so Google gains trust with your website and then you can get solid high authority links on top. To do this doing a local citation campaign is a must. You can use tools like Moz Local or even builders like YEXT to build local citations for you quickly and effectively.
Content Research
Having effective content is critical and if you are not putting historical data or trends into your content creation you are behind the times. You can use tools like Buzzsumo to see what content has produced the best social media shares or backlinks and therefore make even better content. This makes your content better and more effective than ever before! You can also use trends to see which pieces of content are strongest during time periods or seasons. Or, there might be time sensitive content producing great results you can replicate easily and effectively.
On Page Optimization
Having good on page optimization is important otherwise, how would Google know what to rank you for? The first part of on page optimization is keyword research and understand what are your best keywords to rank for on every page. Once you understand the keywords you want to edit your meta title, description, URL, H1 tag, and body content based on it. For the ultimate guide to on page optimization check this out.
Speed Optimization
One of the main technical SEO improvements in 2016 and beyond is site speed. Having good site speed, judged by the Google page speed tool, if extremely low hanging fruit for any business trying to gain organic search rankings. You can use the Google page speed tools to see how you do and what improvements are needed to have a better score. Use this tool to get a quicker speed and provide a better user experience.
User Experience Testing
One factor people do not know about in Google search is usability. Having good usability allows Google to see visitors interacting positively with your site and then they can rank you higher based on this. This video shows the pogo stick and how to solve it but a good user experience is always a good start and having a clear landing page for the searcher to go to.
Interlinking
One very easy to implement and manage tactic is interlinking. In your blog content and service pages you can interlink from one page to the other so you can pass authority from one page to the next. This only works if the page has authority to begin with but it can be a very good tactic to pass good authority from one to the other to rank other pages higher. However, only do this if it makes sense and works well for the content.
