It can be difficult to decide what type of SEO strategy best fits your needs. Is it local SEO, or national, or does your SEO need to function globally? What about voice search, website health, and brand presence? And then you can’t forget about UX (user experience).
Fortunately, these are no longer separate entities when it comes to a well-tuned SEO strategy. All of these share the same nuts and bolts. While the weight of each factor may vary for each “style” of SEO, you can still hit on all of the major factors in one meta-SEO strategy that can meet all of your needs.
Or at least support all of your needs. The idea is to keep everything swimming in the same direction, and to maximize every effort (instead of contradicting or duplicating efforts).
Merge Your SEO Strategies
The first step is to identify what the most important factors of each different type of SEO are. For example, no matter what kind of SEO strategy you’re employing, high-quality content and link building will be important. Many of the SEO improvements that you can make to optimize your site for voice search or for mobile indexing, for example, will also improve your other SEO strategies as well.
Since all SEO strategies touch on the same factors and techniques, improving what you’ve determined to be the most important overall factors will benefit all of your SEO. Some strategies may still require SEO tactics that benefit only one type of SEO (Google My Business for local SEO, for example), but overall, your SEO strategies can be merged. Consolidating SEO strategies into one mega SEO strategy will also streamline all of your SEO efforts, making the process easier to keep track of.
Keywords: Be Honest, and Be Specific!
Keywords are perhaps one of the most important considerations in SEO. Without a good keyword strategy, users won’t be able to find your website. Even if they do, they may not be the type of user you’re looking to attract.
When choosing your keywords, think about what your desired audience may be looking for in order to find you. How would they word the issue they’re having? How would they describe your service, the very first time they walk into your office – before they’ve picked up on your industry jaron? What are some of their very first questions when they call?
It’s also important to think about what your website is capable of ranking for. Even if your area of expertise falls into the category of marketing, for example, there are so many other sites competing for the top search ranks for that keyword that it will be difficult to rank highly. If you can narrow down your keywords to those that you can rank for, that can help you rank higher for that search, allowing users to find your site more easily.
For that matter, the more specific you can be about what it is that you do, the more specific your keyword strategy is, the better your on-site conversion rates will become because your website traffic will be more qualified.
So on that note, let’s review some common keyword styles:
Localized Keywords:
If your site is for a business with a physical location, that location can be included in your keyword – not only does this help with narrowing down your keyword but also helps with your local SEO strategy by helping you rank for your location.
Long-Tail Keywords:
The longer your keywords are, the higher you’ll likely be able to rank for that keywords. Having longer key phrases may also help guide more users to your site as more users search using longer key phrases now than single key words.
Question Keywords:
Wording you keywords as questions (and then answering them in the content of your website) is a good way to not only use longer, more specific key words and phrases, but it is the best way to engage with users who are using voice search.
Link Building
Link building is essential to your SEO campaign no matter what kind of SEO strategies you are using. It’s important to ensure that backlinks to your site are of good quality. Spammy backlinks will hurt your rankings overall, so for any SEO strategy, you can’t just get any backlink that comes your way, but need to be more discerning in your link-building campaign. Local SEO campaigns to engage with local businesses and local sites can result in backlinks that can help your overall SEO campaign.
Business Directories
Business directories such as Google My Business, Yelp, and others are good resources for businesses. They give users an opportunity to review your company (5-star reviews are great!). Making it easy for them by having detailed information about your company, as well as links to your website, can help guide users from business directory listings to your site, improving your search rankings. Having directory entries can also improve your brand presence, as users may like to see what others have been saying about your website.
High-Quality Content
Content is king. Whatever your SEO strategy is, if you don’t have high-quality content on your website, your search rankings will suffer for it. In many cases, it’s actually beneficial to your rankings to just remove older, thinner content altogether rather than have pages with thin content on your site. Improving your site’s content and ensuring that it is useful to your users will improve your search rankings across the board and also keep users coming back, which will further improve rankings.
Mobile-First Indexing
Regardless of where your SEO focus lies, all websites are being indexed by their mobile version first. Therefore, optimizing your website for mobile use is vital to improving any SEO campaign. Optimizing for mobile improves your SEO across the board, whether users are accessing your site from mobile devices (which the majority are) or from a computer, as it improves user experience.
Website Health
The health of your website is an essential part of your SEO strategy. Website health affects page load speed, the overall quality of your content (as Google sees it), user experience, and even SEO directly (via title tags, alt text, etc.). Going through each page of your website and getting rid of thin content, improving the optimization of each page, improving page speed, and just overall improving the health of your website can go a long way towards improving user experience and your search rankings.
User Experience
User experience is the most important thing in SEO. All of your other efforts will have been for nothing if users have poor experiences on your site, your search rankings will still suffer because of a high bounce rate. Ensuring good UX should ultimately be the highest priority of all kinds of SEO campaigns and therefore should be the top factor in your meta SEO strategy.
Streamlined SEO
Having one overall SEO strategy that meets the needs of all of your different SEO campaigns can streamline the SEO process, hit upon all of the important factors for each type of SEO and improve your search rankings across the board. SEO isn’t separate from brand presence, user experience, and website health anymore. All of these things contribute to your overall search rankings and work together. Improving even one of these factors can affect the others positively.
Recent Comments