12 Steps to Improve Your SEO
Millions of organic marketers set off with goals of big traffic and leads from Google and Bing. Yet without summoning sufficient resources, talent, and focusing efforts on what really brings results, any SEO strategy is bound to create disappointment.
The reason is simple. Search engine indexes are stuffed with billions of pages. It is very competitive now regardless of your niche. Know matter how unique your content, keyword selection, and target reader, you’re in a very competitive space.
The requirement then is to get competitive enough to create your niche and then power up beyond the competition.
If you don’t want to be competitive, your chances of success are very low. You have to step up to plate with confidence. The start of this the 12 Steps to Great SEO.
Winning is a Conversation?
Yes, successful companies create “conversations” (and narratives) that help them bond to audiences and generate a buzz. Your goal is to develop a voice in your content that resonates with customers. That approval is detected by Google and Bing, and Facebook and Twitter too in how web users engage with your site and promote it.
The conversation your strategic content generates helps SEO results immensely. Building your content first, to satisfy this conversation and engagement goal is essential. Otherwise, your keyword intentions will fail.
These conversations are increasingly monitored as quality signals for rankings. Yes, they will have a “keyword buzz” to them but the real goal is to build reach to wider audiences, grow content engagement, assist with the lead to sales funnel, and to generate new traffic and build links to your site. Also, these conversations help to get your content shared to create links, mentions, and a buzz about your business. That’s a big part of building the strong overall keyword power you’ll need.
Your SEO strategy marries to that content strategy to produce content and social messages that build engagement and sharing, and repeat visits — all key quality signals the search engines include as part of their quality algorithms. It’s content designed for a conversation that results in the world promoting your site. So, it’s not just a bunch of keywords planted within the copywriting!
An SEO Audit Can Lead to Bigger Awareness
An SEO audit is part of a digital marketing audit and will help illuminate the 12 steps to strong SEO results.
An SEO consultant can only tell you what I advise about in this blog. If you buy my digital marketing audit service, I provide very detailed and key insights into your site’s performance and likely, your reasons for failure. It’s an SEO audit inside a digital marketing audit. For instance, you may not realize your content is thin and non engaging. It’s possible you may have even suffered some algorithmic penalties for thin or duplicate type content that you don’t even realize has happened.
The content you thought was so great might be actually killing your success.
Google’s indexing algorithmic indexing system is very complicated and most website owners have no idea what is going on with their site. Negative SEO can hurt your site too. Google in particular, may interpret your most recent content whether landing pages or blog content in a negative way. Discovering what they don’t like is a big part of SEO now.
I always enter the SEO wars as an underdog.
Rarely do we get to work for the biggest, wealthiest companies with huge promotional budgets and well known brands and bountiful, professionally developed content. Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Instead, we need strategy to help our underdog, startup client, get exposure and compete with over-funded companies which are well established online and in Google. Even with strategy, it’s frustrating at times and will test your patience and determination.
Yet strategy is your best weapon and it will ultimately see you becoming a market leader. Be confidence about this if your intent is real.
2 Key Reasons for Failure:
- they lack an executive level champion who fights for the SEO and content effort and captures resources to create a powerful SEO strategy
- an unwillingness to hire exceptionally talented SEO experts and content creators to create engaging conversations with visitors
Businesses who strategize to build valuable web content, execute persistently, and continuously optimize their web content assets using analytics will win this battle for ranking supremacy.
Other Reasons for SEO Failure:
- lack of SEO knowledge and lack of confidence to put a winning strategy together
- insufficient resources such as funding, software tools, content as well as customer and industry connections
- poor quality SEO techniques
- poor quality content with a lack of original material created by you
- no alignment between content and SEO
- poor skills in creating emotional connection with audience
- lack of creative talent in content and social outreach
- not enough market research data leads to thin content
- pursuing wrong keyword phrases or phrases that are too competitive
- lack of SEO and content strategy
- too impatient and not taking time to assure quality through intensive strategy
Fusing SEO and Content Strategy
Traditionally, content SEO, branding, and conversion processes on a business website were kept separate. Each needed their own process and cues to the website visitor. So they were kept separate.
Fast forward to today, and Google and Bing are looking for a consistency between the three. They’re looking at the whole customer journey and sales funnel from first contact to conversion pages. This comes back to the conversation I just spoke about. They want winners in their rankings.
The steps to take involve systematically building a strategy your boss or CEO can have confidence. They won’t invest unless you’ve built a great process. And the process builds engagement and sales generating conversation that makes everyone believe your site is the center of the universe.
12 Simple Steps in SEO Strategy
- Buy an SEO Audit or Digital marketing audit and then establish SEO goals and kpis
- study market demand and what is most sought by customers
- study and identify your target markets needs, preferences and pain points
- study search volume, keyword usage using SEO software to guide keyword choices
- decide on core keywords, topics and keyword phrases which will guide your content development
- decide on related words that Google/Bing will consider relevant
- study high ranking competitors on those keyword phrases using an SEO software platform to see which of their content produces results
- brainstorm content ideas and layout topics for publication
- layout out your keyword/topic tree and load content onto each branch
- acquire an analytics tool to track your KPIs, sales, rankings, engagement, search engine traffic and social media leads
- test content elements to learn which elevate rankings
- run customized performance reports to identify what is working and what systematic improvements you should make
That’s your process. The strategy isn’t a military exercise. It’s a creative one that isolates the key success factors so you can understand them better. Your SEO analytics solution will be very important.
Honestly, if you’re serious about success, then the digital marketing audit (includes SEO Audit) is the right way to proceed. Getting everything aligned and powered up from the root level is just plain wise.
More insight on the AI Marketers blog: SEO Company | Selecting the Right SEO Company | Digital Marketing Audit | Digital Marketing Audit Buyers Guide | SEO Audit | SEO Techniques | CRO Tips | Industry Expertise | AI Marketing Software | Marketing Services | Marketing San Diego | AI SEO | Search Engine Optimization | Calgary SEO | Marketing San Diego | SEO Services Boston | Marketing Agencies in California | Professional SEO
