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:
Depth of content-> single topic of focus for an entire page
Breadth of discussion-> related diverse topics addressed across website
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
How does HubSpot do this? -> Blogging is our primary source of traffic believe it or not! We have done this by sitting down and identifying topics that we want to be known for. Start by identifying topics 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.
@Akki46 a few resources I use, for different reasons, include Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, HubSpot, Yoast (if you're in WordPress), Answer the Public, and Google Ads.
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+1 to @danmoyle Answerthepublic and Spyfu are two excellent tools that can help you understand what people are searching for and how competitors are ranking for keywords/topics.
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!
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