4 common traits of successful SEO campaigns
Good search engine optimisation (SEO) drives top-ranked websites. Here are the four things all successful SEO practitioners and their campaigns have in common.
1. Your SEO practice is current
Search engines are evolving and, at a time when Google might change its algorithm overnight, it pays to stay on top of changing trends and best practices. In the early days of SEO, all you needed was lots of keywords stuffed into your content to climb the rankings. Today, quality and originality are important factors—two traits that weren't considered as high priority a few years ago compared to now.
Every good SEO campaign manager keeps on top of trends and changes by monitoring the SEO world. Knowing when a change will occur and, more importantly, knowing what to do to stay ahead of it is part of your role. This will ensure you’re running the best campaign possible, not to mention increasing your chances of reaching–or keeping–that number one spot.
2. Your content is high quality
Remember the days of websites with badly written, keyword-heavy content? Did it make sense? Who cares—it helped the site rank well on Google. Those days are gone. The new paradigm is to reward websites that focus on engaging, high quality content. Making content valuable to the reader is now essential if your SEO campaign is to succeed, so keep this in mind next time you are tempted to litter keywords awkwardly throughout your sentences.
Yes, keywords are still an important component of SEO, but they must appear in context with high quality writing. Search engines are getting smarter and more attuned to human preferences for the things they read, so needless repetition is out. Google knows that the person viewing your website doesn’t want to read keywords 10 times in the space of just a few sentences: they want informative, easy-to-understand content that's highly relevant to the term they searched for in the first place.
3. You publish new blog content regularly
Blogs are the must-have accessory this season. Just a few years ago they were optional extras, and too many websites treated them as such. Setting up a blog page and then shoving your keywords in a few boring posts and then forgetting about it was almost a rite of passage for a new website.
Well, it's time to revisit this neglected web-child, because in recent years having a blog has become an integral component to how well a website ranks. Unfortunately, it's not a 'set and forget' scenario. Publishing one or two posts, no matter what the quality, won't cut it any more. Just like the rest of your campaign, you need to work on it in order to see the results.
A blog campaign needs to publish content that's engaging, informative and, above all, regular. That means go light on the sales and marketing messages—don’t simply use it to push products—and really examine what kind of content will be of value to your visitors.
Post regularly—current wisdom suggests once a week at a minimum—and try to cover a broad range of topics relevant to your industry or complementary to the kinds of things your customers enjoy to make the content likeable and shareable. This will not only attract more clicks, which boosts your ranking for certain keywords over time, it will increase your chances of being linked by external sites.
4. Your content builds links
Links amplify your SEO efforts. Everything you've implemented until this point will receive a significant boost when link-building comes into play, and this happens outside your control. The best you can do is to make your content shareable
Google looks kindly upon websites that prove themselves to be high quality, genuinely useful destinations for the people who visit it. External link-building demonstrates that other websites endorse you, conferring authority and legitimacy to your site in the eyes of Google, qualities that contribute to your quest for the top rank.
If you want to stand out in the digital realm, SEO is an essential practice. Keeping ahead of trends and producing shareable, regular, quality content is the key to appeasing search engines to help you rank well and ensure potential customers find you.
ENDS
If you would like to discuss the contents of this article further or ask questions about your current digital marketing strategy, please contact me on [email protected]