SEO is always changing and evolving, but one thing remains the same as it always has (and will) — and that it search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy and not something you can expect to see results in just a few months, no matter how much money you dump into it.
For me personally, it took almost a year of publishing content before I saw noticeable organic results, and I had experience and knew how to execute a correct strategy. SEO is also not something you can press pause on and take a break. You have to keep pushing and even if you get some momentum you have to push harder.
From day one I have never slowed down or took a break from SEO — I have constantly published content with the goal of increasing the organic traffic to the website month after month, and it has paid off. The non-stop SEO effort has paid off in the way of helping to build a seven-figure agency.
If you want to take advantage of what SEO can do for your business, then you need to know what aspects of search marketing to focus your time and energy on. Let’s dive right in – these are the important factors you need to devote your time, energy, and money to if you want to get your piece of the Google traffic pie.
2019 SEO requires much more than we did in previous years..
Think Beyond Links (But Don’t Forget They Are #1)
Today, search engine optimization takes more than just links, but since they remain the top signal within Google’s search algorithm you cannot ignore them. You need to continue to build strong authority links from relevant websites aggressively, but that alone will not take you to the top of the SERPs and keep you there.
There seems to be a very divided SEO community these days, with the old school blackhat SEOs who are only focused on links and nothing else, and then the new school folks who talk about links like they are some dirty little secret. The two sides need to mate and produce a new offspring — modern day SEO realists.
You have to be very technically sound, in terms of on-site optimization and also little elements like speed, IP address, and server errors all contribute a little bit. It’s important to have an open mind and put the proper time and energy into even the little things, because that is what it takes today, while also not falling into the BS being spewed by this new age SEO mentality that links are bad. They aren’t. They are amazing, but you can’t ignore the components of SEO beyond the links any longer.
Build a Brand and Make it Prominent Across All Social Media
Do you remember back in the day when people would create websites on domains like BuyCheapCarInsuranceOnline.net (just a random example — not even sure if that is a real website) and they would not even think about creating a brand.
They would pick an exact-match domain, depending on whatever keyword they were trying to rank for, jam a bunch of shitty quality spun 500-word articles, and then blast Xrummer links until they ranked, only to start all over from scratch once that domain was penalized by Google.
Today you need to create a brand and market it as such, because Google takes a lot of that into consideration. For example, a website that has consistent social media profiles with the same information and activity, along with consistent NAP (name, address, and phone number) across all of the major business directories, is going to rank higher in the SERPs over a website with no social presence, no brand, and no proof that it’s a legit business.
It doesn’t matter what niche you are in or where you are located. You don’t even have to have a physical brick and mortar location. You just need consistency, so don’t make excuses if you are a virtual operation.
Creating a brand name and treating your website like a real business not only contributes to SEO, but it also helps you build an online asset that will actually increase value, that one day you can potentially sell.
Convert Older Content to Evergreen Assets
If you have been blogging for several years, you most certainly have some older content that isn’t up to date or even relevant any longer. If you have links pointing to those pages or if they are ranking organically, it’s a good idea to update them and rewrite and edit them to turn them into evergreen content.
This is a strategy that needs a little planning, and something that can be done over a long period of time. You want to first audit your content and identify anything that isn’t applicable right now. If someone lands on that page is there value? Do the terms it ranks for even get searched for any longer?
If the pages have some age and authority to them you can make tweaks to the on-site optimization and the content itself to target new evergreen keywords. Over time this strategy will purge your website free of any content that has an expiration date, making your blog a much more valuable asset.
This is also a good time to beef up your content, especially if you started publishing posts back in 2012 and 2013 when the whole “content is king” boom started. While everyone jumped on that train, most continued with the 500-word type posts in terms of length. Now, long-form content is required, so if your posts fall short in the length department this is time to really add value to them.
Avoid Publishing Content That Will Expire
This is an approach that mirrors off what I just mentioned above. Avoiding current events and time sensitive topics will ensure you don’t have to ever go back and audit your content moving forward. While many people search for current event news topics, the chances of you ranking for them are slim, and they soon become worthless posts that just take up server space.
Instead, focus on publishing general topic posts relevant to the keywords and search terms that your target visitor is searching for. A mix of buyer-intent terms as well as information seeking terms can help you attract organic traffic at various stages of the purchase and conversion cycle.
As long as they are not based on a fad or current event, you can then leverage that content for years down the line. When you are able to attract traffic and generate revenue from content that was published in the past it really helps you scale and it makes the ROI on content marketing very attractive.
You can also create massive how to guides or resources that are in the 5,000 to 10,000-word count that can really pull traffic numbers over the years, which also act as great link acquisition tools during your outreach. Think of ways to provide value and watch how many relevant sites will link to you if you simply ask.
Use Google Suggestions to Discover What Real Users are Searching For
There have been several keyword research tools to hit the market, but all they really do is pull for AdWords and generate similar words, without any relation to actual searches on Google. While this can help to spark some ideas, there is zero “science” behind the suggestions, therefore zero guarantee anyone actually using Google will actually search for those options.
If you base your keyword strategy around this you could potentially be wasting a lot of time and money to rank for terms that no real human interested in whatever it is that you are selling will ever enter into Google.
The easiest way to identify keywords that are 100 % being searched is to enter your main keywords and similar terms into Google and seeing what suggestions show up. The suggestions are not guesses — they are being made based on real data Google has. These are terms that are often searched. Google is pulling from its own database to show these, and not some random name or word generator. If you see a suggestion, you be certain that the effort required to rank for it will pay off because there are users who are actually entering that term or search query into Google.
The higher up on the suggestion list, the more searches are likely being performed. Do this once in a while to get some new ideas, and potentially identify some low hanging fruit to rank for.
Link to Your Most Popular Pieces of Content from Your Homepage
Above when talking about publishing evergreen content I mentioned creating some epic how to guides or resources that were in the 5,000 to 10,000-word range. These are typically the pages you want to rank for very high volume and profitable keywords.
The large articles help to pull in more traffic, but they also are easier to build links to because they provide so much value. In order to help push more juice to these and push them up in the SERPs you should link to them from your homepage and use the main keyword as anchor text. There is nothing wrong with this.
You just want to create a “resources” section, whether it’s via a widget in your sidebar or a dedicated section in your footer. Either way, you are going to pass the authority to these pages, and if you do locate them in your footer or sidebar you can also set it so every single page on your website is pushing juice to these epic resources.
For brand new sites this isn’t going to have a major impact right away, but for the more established domains that are sitting at Domain Authority of 40 or more, rolling this out can shoot these pages into the SERPs and you will often see these pages start to rank for a lot more long-tail terms, which drives traffic to them through the roof in a short period of time.
Optimize Your Titles and Meta Descriptions to Pull Higher CTRs (Click-Through-Rates) Using Emojis
This is something very simple, yet it’s one of the most overlooked SEO fundamentals, and now more than ever, your title and descriptions can work to help you pull in more clicks if you are not in the top position(s).
How so? Emojis. Yes, emojis.
Think about it for a minute. They are now part of the way we communicate. Scroll through your social media feeds and try to find posts without the use of emojis. It’s very difficult. Now, open your text message conversations and look how often they are used. We even reply using ONLY emojis as they are integrated with our languages.
The great thing about using emojis in your page titles and descriptions is that it gives your listing more attention in the SERPs than if you didn’t include them. You don’t want to go overboard, but one very clever emoji placed in the title and one in the description will draw more eyes to your website, regardless of its position.
Sure, position one will always pull the majority of traffic, but what if you could increase your CTRs by 10 to 20% simply by editing all of your page titles and descriptions? Would that be worth the effort? You bet it is!
Over time, as your click-through-rate improves it tells Google that users like your website more and will reward it with a higher organic position. CTR plays a role in the algorithm.
Mirror Your Content in Multiple Languages
This is a hack that applies to anyone that is targeting customers worldwide.
Start small, but begin to mirror your website for different languages, doing so on sub-domains.
For example, you can pay a freelancer to copy all of your content and translate it into a different language. Let’s assume you have a U.S. website and want to target Spanish speaking traffic. You would have all pages translated and then set up a subdomain such as spanish.yourwebsite.com and mirror the site.
You don’t have to worry about duplicate content because it’s on its own sub-domain and it’s not duplicate — it’s a completely different language. This is a very easy way to really scale your traffic and sales.
Conclusion
SEO is worth the effort, and as long as you know from the start that it’s going to take time, then you are more likely to stick with it. The businesses that claim SEO doesn’t work are the ones that expected instant results and when they didn’t see that happen they quit and made excuses.
Use the points above to make sure you are putting your energy into the areas that are going to help you achieve the results you are after. When you avoid the pitfalls and time-wasting aspects of SEO, and instead put your time (and money) into the areas that are more beneficial, you will get to where you want, results-wise, much sooner.
What do you think of what was covered above? Agree? Have anything to add? Let me know if the comments below and we can spark some SEO discussions.
