You’ve probably completed a ton of research on the best industry SEO practices. Swimming through such a vast sea of information can get a bit overwhelming and you probably find yourself asking, why isn’t this best practice working on my website? Where is all the traffic these practices are supposed to be driving? Why am I not securing any more leads than I normally do?
There are so many components to SEO marketing that we could literally write for months on end talking about them. In fact, that’s what some marketers do, like Neil Patel. What you need to realize, though, is that not all SEO techniques are going to deliver the same results for your company as they do others. It all depends on the products you are selling and who your target audience is.
And here’s the hard-to-swallow truth. There is no one-size-fits-all best industry SEO practices guideline. There are, however, several best practices you can integrate into your current content marketing plan that have the potential to increase website traffic and generate leads. These practices won’t harm your marketing efforts in any way and have been deemed as industry SEO best techniques that all businesses can benefit from.
It All Starts With Goals and a Strategy
You have to know what you’re going after in order to measure the effectiveness of your SEO practices. You can implement the best of the best techniques, but if you have no key performance indicators to measure them against, then you’ll never know if they are working well.
When you set goals, you can focus your research on and implementation of SEO practices on ones that are designed specifically to achieve your expectations. The SEO cycle has three main components:
- Set goals
- Create a strategy to reach those goals
- Make adjustments and tweaks as needed to better reach your goals
Sometimes, you may get to the last stage of the SEO cycle and realize instead of an adjustment to your current strategy, you need to create an entirely new one. But remember, your strategy and any adjustments should always reflect back positively on reaching your goals.
Remove Elements That Make Your Site Slow
The speed at which your site loads, as well as each individual page, is crucial to SEO effectiveness. A slow website isn’t going to be favored by Google or any other search engine. And it most certainly is not going to be well-liked by site visitors. This is why you need to test each pages’ speed and remove any elements that are slowing them down. Did you know that even a single second delay in loading time can result in a seven percent loss in conversions?
eConsultancy released data showing that 40 percent of people choose to exit out of a site if it takes any more than three seconds to load. This means your site needs to be very fast. And not only will 40 percent of people abandon the site, but a whopping 80 percent of them won’t return at all to see if your page load time has been improved.
The top five ways to speed up page load are:
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Make sure JavaScript loading is deferred
- Switch to a faster DNS provider
- Carefully choose a host for your site
- Minimize size of files on your site by running a compression audit
Include Links to Relevant Sites
You might think that linking to other sites is going to direct people away from your site, but not if you’re smart about it. Linking out to authoritative sites makes it easier to track the traffic that’s coming to your site; this trackable data can prove to be a very valuable resource.
Linking out to other sites also shows your site visitors that you’re not all about yourself. That you’re willing to direct them to helpful content even if it wasn’t created by you. In doing this, you build trust with your visitors.
To be smart about linking out to other sites, always make sure you embed the links so that they open in a new tab. You don’t want a site visitor clicking on the link and taken straight to the linked site on the same tab they are using to view your site. By making it so the linked site opens in a new tab, it ensures that your website’s tab is still open in the user’s browser.
Adding links to other sites is also critical to getting backlinks to your own site from reputable websites. After all, if you’re not willing to link out to other sites, then why should these sites be willing to link to yours?
Stop Writing for the Search Engines
Keywords are good. They help you create content that lands in front of your targeted audience. Using keywords to impress search engines, however, is not something you want to do. This is why you need to publish content that has been created specifically for the targeted audience and not the search engine. You can mess with meta tags, image captions, page descriptions and other elements to seduce Google.
How do you create content without search engines influence the process? You simply don’t think about them when you’re writing. Instead, think about whatever it is you want to say and simply say it. When you create content that brings value to someone, this is known as true SEO copywriting.
If you choose to hire someone to create content for your site, make sure you read through several pieces of their work to get a good idea of the voice they portray in their writing. A good SEO copywriter, however, will be able to alter their voice to meet the needs of each client. This person will want to study your brand and any existing content to get a good feel of the voice he or she needs to include in any writing produced for your brand.
It’s also important that you devote a lot of time to the content you publish. Publishing five blog posts a week that provide no real value to the reader isn’t going to drive nearly as much traffic as publishing one post that truly engages the reader and leaves them looking forward to your next post.
Plus, content that provides real value to the reader is going to be content they want to share. It will also be content that other sites want to link back to. And the more backlinks you get from reputable and authoritative sites, the better.
Publish Frequently
Yes, we just stated that it’s best to publish one valuable blog post a week rather than five that leave the reader wondering why they even started reading it in the first place. But still yet, it’s imperative to publish as much content as possible. In fact, data from 2017 shows that the more content you publish, the higher the number of leads you will attract.
If your site has only zero to 100 blog postings, you’re going to attract about 100 leads a month. With 400+ postings, though, you’ll attract more than 300 leads a month. With this in mind, you need to be creating as much content as possible, and you need to be doing it now. The sooner you grow the size of your site, the sooner the Google bots can start crawling and indexing your content, which is pertinent to landing your site in front of your targeted audience.
Share On Social Media
This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many social media sites many businesses fail to share their content on. Many of them think sharing content on Facebook is going to be the magic key to unlocking unlimited amounts of website traffic. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Facebook is a great platform to share content on, but is this the platform for you to best reach your targeted audience? If not, then you need to look at your social media profiles and determine which platforms your targeted audience is most likely to be on. From Google+ to LinkedIn to Instagram, there is a whole world of social media sites where your targeted audience is already hanging out on. You need to pinpoint which ones they use most and share your content on each of them.
It’s Time to Start Using the Best Industry SEO Best Practices
We’ve outlined six of the best industry SEO best practices that any business can benefit from. All of these best practices are only the beginning of an effective content marketing strategy, but they can increase website traffic and improve lead generation, both of which should be at the core of your current marketing agenda.
You can check out our on page SEO services page to learn how we can boost your rankings.
