Search engine optimization is an important tool in the arsenal of many marketing professionals, and it's always evolving. What worked for the industry last year might not be what's trending in 2018. So, what are some of the more effective SEO techniques and tips to watch out for in 2018? What are the SEO techniques that work and have stood the test of time to ensure that businesses are able to craft effective marketing campaigns? Let's take a look.
Engage with Customers More to Improve Ratings
Anyone familiar with how Google search results and analytics works knows that the more you engage with customers on social media, the more organic traffic you'll get on your website. Combined, this all leads to higher ratings on Google, which means your business will show up higher on a search result list than others.
The key to achieving this is to keep customers interested in your website and what you have to offer. Make a customer's experience on your website enjoyable with features like the following that keep customers coming back for more:
- Personalized Pages
- Mobile Capabilities
- Fast Response Times
- Entertaining and Educational Blogs
- Engaging Videos
Written content should always be short, concise, and easy to scan, and the overall website should be easy to navigate with engaging headers and subheaders designed to get users to stay on your website as long as possible. By managing websites in this manner, visitors won't feel overwhelmed and are typically more open to engaging.
Don't Shy Away from Backlinks
Other SEO methods that aren't going away anytime soon are backlinks. Creating backlinks is one of the most effective SEO strategies because they're effective at helping businesses achieve top ratings in web searches. In fact, they're so effective that businesses that don't utilize them on their websites typically fall short on web search ranking lists.
All that being said, it's important that any backlinks be high quality and effective. Too often backlinks, such as blog comments and paid links, are spammed easily, lowering the quality of the backlink. Because of this, it's imperative that companies take the time to craft good content to earn quality links.
One way to check the quality of a backlink is with ScanBacklinks.com. Quality backlinks will inform search engines like Google that your audience enjoys what you're posting. The result will be a boost in ratings and increased web traffic, proving that different techniques of SEO, like backlinks, are well worth the time and investment.
Keywords Are Out, Topics are In
Over recent years, there's been a shift in the SEO world from churning out keyword-heavy content to focusing more on crafting strong, engaging content topics. Now, it's important to remember that creating topics and content about the sort of things your followers and customers are interested in will take a bit of research, but it will be well worth it in the end. What sort of research, though?
For starters, you will need to have a good handle on the demographics of your target audience. Additionally, keyword research techniques are often a good place to start when trying to figure out what's trending in the industry. Once you figure that out, you can group your audience into different themes and create a variety of relevant topics tailor-made for each theme.
Not only does this show a desire to engage with all types of website visitors, but it fosters engagement and boosts web traffic, which is why it's one of the best, most simple SEO techniques for 2018 for beginners and advanced SEO professionals alike.
Recharge Your Existing Content
Who says you can’t reuse existing content, especially if you're a blogger or your business website has an active blog attached to it that churns out a lot of content? Unlike offpage SEO techniques, existing content is a gold mine in terms of attracting new or existing customers back to your site, and it’s one of the most popular on page SEO techniques available.
Things like articles and blogs are also easy to share on social media platforms and are ideal to reach a broad audience in a short amount of time. But how can businesses reuse existing content? It's easy. Figure out what kind of content your visitors and followers respond best to and perform a content audit.
During a content audit, you or your writing and marketing team will tweak or improve existing blogs, articles, or other types of content and rerun them on a website or social media platforms.
Final Thoughts
There's no denying that the world of SEO, including black- and white-hat SEO, is constantly changing and evolving. With all the latest changes and advances, it's an exciting time to be working in the industry, especially with so many effective white-hat strategies on hand, like those mentioned above, to help businesses grow and succeed.
However, for businesses to continue succeeding in their respective industries, it's important that marketing teams continue learning and applying new strategies in order to stay relevant. Fortunately, SEO makes sharing knowledge and information easy, so even newbies to the field are typically able to learn and apply strategies like backlinks into an existing marketing strategy with assistance from more experienced SEO and marketing experts.
What do you think? What SEO strategies does your business rely on to attract and retain customers?
P.s. Don't forget to recommend the article to your friends using the social media buttons to spread the word about this useful information.