If you’re looking to gain an increase in organic traffic to your site, having a solid SEO strategy will get you just that. It’s important to remember not every SEO strategy works for every site/industry. We suggest you try out different strategies and measure which works best for your content.
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The first step in any SEO strategy is to create content
- Make a list of topics to blog about (ie. your short tail keywords).
- Research long-tail keywords based on these topics.
- Build pages/blog posts for each topic/short tail keyword.
- Set up a blog.
- Blog every week to develop page authority (targeting long tail keywords).
- Build internal linking between short tail and long tail content.
- Create a external link-building plan.
- Stay current on SEO news & practices.
- Measure and track your content’s success.
You might notice that for a lot of these subjects, we’ve blogged about them in the past.
SEO Strategy Step #1: Make a list of topics to blog about (ie. your short tail keywords)
Start by writing all of the keywords that come to mind as being related to your business.
Generic keywords: these are generic words that describe your business as well as other businesses in your niche. Given the immense competition among paid and organic results, ranking for these keywords is difficult. Nevertheless, your audience is likely to search for these terms in the first stage.
Long-tail keywords: About 70 percent of queries are long-tail. Even if you think longer keywords might not be used frequently by your audience, remember that all combinations of long-tail keywords can provide as much traffic as the short-tail keywords. Keep that in mind and think about some effective phrases.
Location-based keywords: These keywords are especially good for local businesses because they contain business’ location. The competition for these keywords may be high or low depending on the location but local customers are most likely to find you and convert using these keywords.
Since this is the first step in an SEO strategy we’ve covered keyword research for a number of different channels, like nonprofits, and YouTube.
This is why it’s always handy to plan your posts ahead of time. Conjuring up a topic and then writing out all the different ways that topic can be expanded into multiple posts is a good way to gain more clicks. This is a highly recommended SEO strategy.
Using Google’s Keyword Tool can help you figure out what keywords work best for your kind of posts.
You’ll find a lot of options on there, but try to find and write down around 10 of them. To help you choose, figure out which ones are most relevant to the post you’re going to create.
Also, see what these words are like amongst your competition. It also helps to check what their search volumes are like.
Keep those 10 keywords in mind as you create your post.
But you’ll need more than just these keywords. You have to also come up with suitable long-tail keywords. If you haven’t heard of this phrase before, a long-tail keyword can be three to 10 words that further explain the topic.
The competition level of these tend to be lower than a single keyword.
Here’s an example: A single keyword would be “cuisine”. A long-tail keyword would be, “quickest homemade cuisine recipes”. When you search up the results from of the keyword compared to the long-tail keyword, the number of results are vastly different.
Don’t overuse your long-tail keyword.
If you overuse your long-tail in your post this can actually cause Google to lower your result ranking. Overusing is looked at as keyword stuffing. Keep from using your long-tail keyword more than three times.
Post at least once a week.
By blogging once a week you have a better chance at gaining Google’s attention. You don’t need to post every day. Quality over quantity is important. Readers don’t want a spam of useless content just to be reminded you’re still active.
Inbound links can be beneficial in your SEO strategy.
An inbound link is a backlink that leads to a site that is not yours. These links can be used to emphasize a topic. When you’re going to use a link to someone else’s site, try reaching out to the creator. If you get along with other bloggers you can have a trade. You use their links in your post and they can share yours.
It’s a friendly way to gain organic traffic. These other bloggers will most likely have different audience members than yours thus bringing in new readers for you.
Minimize your media size.
The more you post, the more media your site will obtain. It’s important to have this in order to gain attention. But, media are files. Files can take up a lot of space.
When too much space is taken up, your sites speed rate can be affected. The larger files are, the harder it can be for a browser to pull your page up.
If your site isn’t up to speed it can alter where your site appears on search engine rankings.
Before uploading a photo to a post you should check out its size. If it’s more than a megabyte (MB), you should compress it. There are plenty of free sites available that allow you to do this. Consider using PicMonkey or Resize Image
Make sure to compare the difference prior to uploading. Some photos can lose a great amount of quality when being resized. User a resizer that works best for your images.
If you have any tips on how to gain organic traffic feel free to share them below.
