I’ve seen numerous business owners remain skeptical about that fact that search engine optimization (SEO) can be easy.
The lifeblood of any online business is not just content, but the complete strategy one puts in, with SEO being a top priority.
I’ve worked with a handful of bloggers and online business owners who underestimate the power and resources required for an SEO campaign.
More often, they read different case studies online that says how a X blogger raked in thousands of search visits from zero in a few months and how their revenue scaled up.
Without even getting to know what industry or what niche they’ve worked in, they try to put in the same strategy the so-called “blogger” implemented and they see no change.
Content gets ranked but nowhere near to the first few search pages in Google. Even if a visitor drops by chance, they don’t convert and their business makes no profit.
SEO is a tad bit difficult. The digital world and how search algorithms work is unpredictable and you probably already know this by now. Here are a few things that you always need to keep up with when it comes to implementing the right SEO strategy.
“Great Content” Is Not Enough
Content was the king. It is not anymore. Having said that, I don’t particularly mean you need to stop producing great content. Quality content should always be a top priority. But the publish-and-pray approach in SEO is outdated. There are thousands of blogs and online businesses in the same industry, and simply producing quality content only is not going to outrank them.
You need to focus on content that resonates with your buyers persona. You need to analyze keywords and align them in the best possible way within your content that you want to rank for.
But without promotion, a great piece of content is always going to bite the dust. Take your post to social media. Publish on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Promote them. Find social media groups related to your industry and share what you’ve written. But, never overdo it.
Every Content You Publish Is Not Going to Bring You Traffic
I visit Google Analytics countless times a day and even with a great search engine optimization strategy, only a few posts drive a lot of traffic. In fact, some posts don’t get visitors in double digits.
HubSpot, a top Internet marketing blog today reports that 46 percent of the overall traffic they gain comes from 0.5 percent of their content (about 30 out of 6,000). Despite HubSpot being a great website with strong rankings on Google and the leader in their industry, not all of their content drives huge traffic. Well, this does not mean that some of your posts that don’t get traffic are unnecessary, or that you shouldn’t write about them because they don’t bring in search results.
You always need to dig into how you can make your small number of posts successful. Focus on a small number of content first. Develop a SEO strategy for the best of the best content on your blog. This way, you won’t need to spend a lot of time in optimizing all of your blog posts.
However, you should not stop caring about the content that is not driving any traffic right now. You can always leverage and repurpose them for interlinking blog posts, which also helps other content to rank better.
Backlinks Matter
“Guest blogging is dead,” said Matt Cutts. But, he never mentioned about link building no longer being a factor for search engine rankings.
While Google is always careful about the huge number of links generated previously through guest blogging and paid-posts, link building is always a top concern when it comes to SEO. If you’d stopped working on your link building strategies, you need to reconsider it.
Backlinks are the most important factor when it comes to implementing a perfect SEO strategy. Not only do backlinks enhance your branding and give you traffic and referrals, they help you improve your search rankings as well.
In fact, the content that ranks on the first page of search results in Google are because of the backlinks they have. This does not mean that backlinks are everything, but backlinks that come link to stellar content, which is detailed and in-depth is what Google ensures as a top priority.
Google PR Is Dead Now
There are several metrics including Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA) and Trust Flow metrics that you can analyze to research on the quality of backlinks you’ve gained. You always need to stay aware of spam-backlinks that your competitors can build for negative SEO.
Check the links that come to your site on Google Webmasters Tools. If you find something that is not related to your industry and is a low-quality backlink, disavow them quickly.
The Bottom Line
Search engine optimization is necessary everywhere for commercial competitive queries and general search terms. Though the competition has become more difficult today, knowing details and taking the right approach can increase your overall online presence in and out of search engines.
Source: Business
