Guess what?

SEO is dying and you need to stop right now. Stop what you are doing and panic. It’s all over.

That is pure sarcasm. Regardless of what the SEO guru turds want you to believe, SEO is alive and kicking, more than ever. Google is still giving you all the opportunity in the world to suck a whole lot of organic traffic to your website and convert it into cash money.

Know why SEO is a better opportunity now, than it was in the past? Because your competition is slacking. They are listening to the gurus and scrambling. When they do this, they take attention and focus away from their SEO efforts and this causes holes to spring in their ship.

While your competition is slacking, you can pick up the slack and make epic gains in the SERPs. I’m not even suggesting that you have to do crazy over the top SEO. You simply have to increase your efforts in the areas that your competition is ignoring.

Focus on putting more effort into the areas within this article and you will see your SEO pay off more now than ever before.

To help you out, I came up with a list of ten ways to help improve your SEO that I can promise your competition is ignoring.

 

1. Optimize all media on your website.

Website speed is such an important part of SEO that is often ignored. People pay so much attention to links and publishing content that they forget the little things. These little things do add up and something as simple as optimizing your images can give you an advantage in the SERPs.

If you are using WordPress there is a plugin called SmushIt that will automatically compress your images, making them load much faster. It will automatically compress images that you upload, and then you can manually compress all of the old images on your website. I would highly suggest this. It’s free and can make a huge speed improvement.

You should also make sure each image has an “alt” tag that relates to the page it’s on and a description that includes the main keyword you are trying to rank the particular page for. You don’t want to use just the keyword as the description, though. Include it in a descriptive sentence that explains what the page is about. If you have ignored this in the past it can take some time to get them all optimized. Do a few every day until you are fully caught up. It’s well worth the effort.

 

2. Optimize your landing pages.

Rather than tying to rank pages for multiple keywords, focus on one page per keyword or search phrase. This allows you to create an offer and call-to-action that is perfectly aligned with the target keyword. Also, it allows you to optimize the on-site elements for a single term. If you are able to give 100% effort for a single term rather than a lower percentage because you are trying to rank for multiple terms, it will help you get more exposure in the SERPs.

It will take more time to build out separate pages, but the extra effort will be rewarded. I have seen some people try to do this by just coping the same page over and over, changing just the page title and URL. This is not a good idea, as having the same content on multiple pages can get you in trouble. Do it the right way to write content on each landing page that is optimized for the keyword and also helps to convert your visitors. Think beyond just rankings. Content needs to also help direct the visitor and tell him or her what you want them to do in terms of conversion.

 

3. Publish infographics on a regular basis.

Links. Link. More links.

You need links to rank, and while your competition is slacking you need to acquire as many niche related links as possible. Buying links is great if you have the budget, but even that doesn’t help secure a large number of niche related links. Many of the sites simply can’t be bought or don’t partake in guest blogs, etc. So, you have to secure them the old fashioned way. The easiest way to do this is by creating amazing infographics that can’t be resisted.

So many people hear that infographics are great and publish one and then stop. You have to publish them on a regular basis. This helps in so many ways. You give your readers great content that will get shared more than traditional blog posts and industry related sites will take note that you constantly create great infographics.

This will eventually lead to branding on niche related websites and links that your competition can’t get. Think about it. There are websites that ANYONE can get links from if they are willing to pay for them. Then, there are websites that only give out links to those who deserve them. Infographics are your ticket to these links.

 

Publish infographics to improve your SEO
Publish infographics to improve your SEO

 

4. Create videos and spread them across YouTube.

YouTube is the second biggest search engine only behind its bigger brother, Google. They share data and are essentially connected. Take advantage of YouTube’s algorithm and rank for your keywords here as well.

This gives you an opportunity to fill the SERPs with pages you own, driving more traffic to your website. Think of YouTube videos like great buffer sites. You can include a link to your landing page in the description, but ranking the YouTube videos allow you to be more aggressive. You aren’t putting your main site in harm’s way. You can properly optimize a video and then fire some “darker” links (hehe) at it to rank it quickly. If it falls off eventually, who cares? Rank another one.

Everyone is so stuck on “white hat” SEO that they forget this is an option to still be a little blackhat, while not risking your website. You can use this to drive traffic and dominate more of the SERPs.

 

5. Repair all broken links on your website.

There are a few tools available to check for broken links on your website. Personally, I believe that Screaming Frog’s broken link checker is the best in the industry. Run your website through it and repair all broken links. If you have outbound links that are broken try to replace them with related content from authority websites.

Linking out to authority sites is also a signal of a strong website. People worry about passing off link juice, but real websites do this all the time and they don’t suffer. Does Forbes get penalized because they link out? Not at all. It shows Google that they are a real source of information. A website that only links internally does nothing to show Google that they are a trusted source of information. You have to link out, so take this opportunity to replace broken links with links to authority sites.

If a website has to many broken links it’s a sign that it’s not updated often. You might also want to consider using a 404-redirect plugin that will redirect broken internal URL’s to your homepage.

 

6. Participate in Q&A style websites.

Think Quora and Yahoo Answers.

Not only can this be a great way to get some links, it can be a huge source of referral traffic that is very targeted. When you do content marketing right, you start to accumulate a lot of blog posts. Over time, you build up such a huge inventory of topics, that it becomes easier to be a reliable source to questions posted on these sites.

For example, if someone asked how to create an infographic that converts and helps attract links, I have several blog posts that would be helpful resources. If I responded with an intelligent answer and gave links to those posts as references, it wouldn’t appear to be spammy. I’d get some links out of the deal and then a lot of referral traffic over time.

If you look, the SERPs contain Q&A from these two sites dating back several years. You can take advantage of the referral traffic several years from now. You have to write well thought out replies for answers and anything you link needs to be related and helpful.

 

Use Q&A sites to improve your SEO
Use Q&A sites to improve your SEO

 

7. Go after your competition’s keywords.

During this time, when gurus are talking about SEO being dead, it gives you a prime example to beat your competition. As they slack and worry about getting Facebook ads running and scaling email list building, you should be trying to outrank them.

This is especially easy for those in medium to lower competition niches. You can pass a lot of websites with just a small handful of editorial links. I have seen first hand how some local businesses shot to the top with a single Entrepreneur, Forbes or Huffington Post link. They pack such a big punch that local businesses can shoot to the top almost instantly.

Use tools like Semrush to see what your competition is ranking for and then evaluate the pages that are ranking using tools like Ahrefs. See what great links they have and secure them, and also add more firepower to your link profile and soar past them.

 

8. Use internal linking.

This is such a basic SEO strategy but most websites completely ignore it. Interlinking allows you to push visitors from one page of your website to another, helping to reduce your bounce rate and increase the average time spent on your website. These signals tell Google that your website is helpful and one that your audience likes.

This is a great reason to always have solid calls-to-action within your content. If you interlink well, you will push traffic across several pieces of content. Offers to download eBooks and join email lists will receive much higher engagement rates if you work them into the content. You can also use pop ups and sliders, but if they appear as native as possible, you will see better results.

If you are having trouble with this, use the search function that pops up (for WordPress users) when you highlight text to link. Find text relevant to a topic you know you have old content about and search for those articles to link to.

 

9. Audit your code.

Bulky code will really weigh your website performance down. A lot of the pre-made themes will be poorly designed and feature a lot of unnecessary code and features. They have to make these themes customizable, with a lot of features. Even if you aren’t using them, the code still exists.

I would suggest that you hire an experienced coder to clean up your code. If your site was custom, there will be much less mess to clean up. If you have a theme, have them remove all the code that doesn’t apply to your website. Doing this will really improve the load time.

There are plenty of good coders that you can hire on freelancer websites for a couple hundred dollars. It’s money well spent in terms of load time, which not only helps you in the SERPs, but also in terms of user experience. Nobody wants to interact with a slow website.

 

Audit your code regularly to improve your SEO
Audit your code regularly to improve your SEO

 

10. Use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) in your content.

If you are writing content for a page that has a focus keyword of “best luxury vacation locations” you would also want to include terms like Bali, Maldives, Bora Bora, etc.

LSI looks for synonyms in your content that are related to the title of your page. If you are writing a piece of content about luxury travel locations, then the search engines are going to expect to find those other related terms. If not, the page title isn’t relevant. This is an example of how the search engines are getting smarter.

When a webpage is crawled by Google, they take the most common words and phrases and identify them, along with the title, as the keywords that describe what the page is about.

 

Conclusion

SEO is dead.

Just kidding. It is alive and well and that is never going to change, as long as search engines like Google exist. While they will continue to change, there is always going to be an organic opportunity for exposure and discovery. I would highly suggest you never rely on organic search 100%, and experiment with multiple paid options, but you simply can’t ignore SEO.

Now is a great time to really push ahead of your competition. There is so much talk in the industry about how SEO is dying (they get bored and need new topics to fire the crowds up) and the average business owner will listen to these guru turds.

While the competition slacks, take the initiative to step up and put in the extra effort to move your website up in the SERPs. In the long run it will be worth it. Remember, SEO isn’t going anywhere. It’s simply just evolving over time.. it’s a great thing, it’s naturally weeding out all the low level pond scum with their spammy tactics in favor of high quality links and content, it’s a great time to be on the SEO scene.

Let me know what you think by dropping a comment below. If you have any specific SEO questions leave them in the comments as well, and I will try my best to answer them as quickly as possible.


Tommy McDonald

Tommy is an SEO professional with years of experience running highly successful SEO companies, founded SerpLogic after noticing there was a major void when it came to options for SEO agencies needing a reliable and professional one-stop outsource solution.You can read all about me in the “About” page here on our blog!


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