All about Improving your SEO- Customer Tips

[katie_cort]

All about improving your SEO!

Hey everyone! Improving SEO is a complex topic that can take a lot of time and resources. I wanted to give a brief intro into some items I typically review with my clients when it comes to improving SEO 🙂

These two strategy plays are proven to help your SEO:

• Getting high quality websites to create natural links to your website

• Creating content that Google recognizes as high quality on your website

Backlinking

Backlinks (also known as "inbound links") are links from one website to another. Having a lot of banklinks to a page will help that page perform better as it will appear higher in organic search.

• People are more likely to link to blog posts, far less natural to link to product page
• It is important to build relationships with journalists, bloggers, influencers and others who may link to your site. What value can you offer to initiate a relationship? Freelance journalists are often a gold mine for link building. 
• Use Moz to track your domains and pages to see linking domains and inbound links. Understand what anchor text isbeing used to link to your site. Track competitors to see their linking domains and inbound link 

High Quality content- what does it mean?

• Be longer than 400 words
• No duplicate content
• Use precise language
• Provide answers to specific questions
• Not be overly broad

Google likes canonical content- which means the high quality page can stand alone  on a website and provide complete answers to visitors questions.

3 criteria:

1. Depth of content-> single topic of focus for an entire page
2. Breadth of discussion-> related diverse topics addressed across website
3. Prominently featured content-> links to your pages consistently appear across your website

Avoid thin content, duplicate content and unfocused content!

How to optimize your pages for indexing:

• Include meta titles on every page. Meta title will be the blue linked title for your page in search results

• Do not hide important content behind log- in screens. Google can only crawl public pages
• Use HubSpot’s tools like pillar pages, topic clusters to plan websites so that they are cohesive and connected to core topics which caters to google’s understanding of websites

Blogging to rank higher

How does HubSpot do this? -> Blogging is our primary source of traffic.

Identify topics that we want to be known for. Start by identifying topicss at the bottom of the funnel and move up. Bottom of the funnel topics could be "customer feedback software" because this search indicates high purchasing intent. Middle of the funnel might be "customer feedback NPS"

• Build relevance- so that you rank for more queries

• Build authority- so that you rank higher in search engines

• Blogging works well with social media-Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Historical optimization

Lastly, you can use historical optimization to make changes to blog posts you have already written to help improve your rank. Rather than starting the content from scratch, optimize what you already have. Start by prioritizing posts that have at least 1,000 organic monthly searches. Update content by adding list items, details, updating outdated info like statistics. Include target keyword in post title and headers. Add an editors note: "This post was originally posted a year ago and has been updated for freshness, accuracy and comprehensiveness." Change the publish date so that it is featured as new and promoted.

More resources/background:

• Google Trends

• Bing Keyword Research 

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• Answer the Public 

• Keyword Tool 

• Ubersuggest 
• Google Keyword Planner
• Spyfu.com

Thank you for reading!

[danmoyle]

Great tips @katie_cort! I especially love the idea of optimizing historical content. It's funny how many old posts/articles still drive traffic, yet have less relevant information. Updating and optimizing could be a full-time job for some brands!