The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is constantly changing. One update from the Google webmaster, and your yesterday’s best-performing technique falls flat.
Does that feel frustrating? Do you think taking a break for some time from the world of SEO will leave you behind others?
You’re not entirely wrong. But what if there is a sustainable strategy to deal with this ever-changing landscape?
In this post, we will reveal the top three techniques developed from the core principles of the world of search. They are not only the top-performing methods for 2021 but can consistently produce results for the coming years. Let’s dive in.
3 Top Techniques to Build Your SEO Strategy
The success of any SEO campaign depends directly upon 3 foundational stakeholders; your target audience, the search engine, and finally, your business. This means missing to fulfill the needs of the stakeholders here will detract you from success.
While satisfying your audience and search engine can rank you at the top of the pages, if you fail to integrate your business interest, you miss out on the opportunity of the search. Although meeting the sweet spot, converging the interests of all may seem an impossible mountain to climb, here are three sustainable ways to do so.
Deliver a unique content experience (On-page SEO)
The make or break element for your SEO in the long term is your audience. This means that starting from on-page SEO, the element you have maximum control over should have all your focus.
- Create high-quality content
The typical anatomy of high-performance content always starts with empathizing with your audience. Acknowledge their frustrations and pain points, and lead them to an actionable solution. But, just being helpful will not do the work.
You need to add dynamism to your content. Ensure that you infuse humor. This will create a long-lasting impact on your audience’s minds. Also, be big on diversifying your content formats and distribution channels. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the chance of having a conversation with your potential audience. Would you?
Another smart tactic here is to perform a content analysis of the top performers in your industry to find what frameworks and topics are already working.
This will give you an in-depth idea of the direction of your content creation process. Topic clusters to keyword placement to mood-setting and choice of words everything is governed backed by this data.
- Optimize for an improved mobile experience
Today your audience spends their time on their respective phones than any other device. This means irrespective of how engaging your content is, if it fails to create an experience that is laser-focused for mobile users, you miss massive traffic and subsequent sales opportunities.
Creating a responsive site is the first step to achieve this regain this traffic. Ensure your content font size and colors don’t take away from the core of the content. Neither shall the fonts be too big nor small. It’s great to use neutral colors or colors that boost extended readership.
- Optimize your content for voice searches
With smarter devices being integrated into your audience’s daily lives, their content consumption behavior is undergoing drastic change. Adobe Analytics survey found out 47% of online searches are performed by voice.
If you haven’t optimized your content frameworks for voice, you are not sustainable in your writing. Listicles are a great way to do this right. Another tactic is to integrate questions into your content pieces.
- Optimize UI and UX for improved audience engagement
Modern markets are highly competitive. This makes standing out increasingly tricky. If you have to create an impact, user experience and user interface are vital.
Having enough white space is critical here. Understand your audience’s world, adapt to their lingo and use their words. Use colors that are in line with the psychographics of your target market. Integrate font types, bullets for structuring your content.
Make sure your content is accessible (Technical SEO)
Producing high-quality content is the first stepping stone of successful SEO. But what if the machine that is going to deliver your sensational offer doesn’t work in your favor?
Technical SEO is thus the second foundational pillar that you should never fail to meet. But amongst Google’s 200+ SEO signals which ones matter? Is there any tactic to boost those signals? Following are the top elements that you need to care about.
- Ensure your site is searchable
You have great content, great site, but none of it is traceable on the web. The result? Waste of money and resource. This means ensuring that the web crawlers of Google can find you is critical. All your ranking opportunities depend on this.
- Optimize your site information architecture
Your site’s architecture management is critical to ensure technical SEO success. If your pages are not logically linked to each other, Google takes it as a negative signal. That being said, having a site map ensures you give the search engine enough reason to index you on the search list.
- Optimize your site speed
With your audience’s attention lower than a goldfish (8 seconds), even Google has prioritized your site speed. This means if your site is taking more than 7 seconds to load, your bounce rate will increase inevitably.
This makes optimizing site speed-critical. Optimizing image size, reducing heavy javascript files, and using CDN networks are some best ways to achieve fast speed. Website cache is also an effective way to do this.
- Use an SSL certificate
Gaining your audience’s trust is vital. While you are doing technical SEO, you can achieve a secured environment for your traffic to scour your website by integrating an SSL certificate.
Use content to satisfy business interests (Off-page SEO)
Having high-quality content that Google loves can get you to the top position of search results. But does that satisfy your business goals? In order to meet the end goal, off-page SEO is critical. Here are a few ways how you can get it right.
- Have an extensive and diversified backlink portfolio
Having high-quality backlinks is key to building trust and authority amongst your target market. This means backlinks not only improve your domain score but affect how you are going to be perceived by your audience in the long run.
If an indirect competitor backlinks you on their site, it impacts your brand in the long term. No matter whom your core backlink strategy targets, you need to ensure they aren’t your direct competitors selling the same product or service.
- Optimize landing pages
Driving traffic to your content is one thing and converting them into customers is entirely another. If you can optimize your landing pages for SEO, there are high chances your conversion rates will experience a boost.
Ensure your copy and CTR buttons reinforce the overall brand story.
No one element can boost your conversions. Be it a color, copy, or design; it is the complete structure that makes your landing pages successful. The more cohesive your landing pages are, the better your results be.
- Utilize a knowledge base system
Your knowledge base isn’t only for your teams and customers to resolve and learn about your tools anymore. It is a powerful marketing tool today.
This means optimizing your knowledge base system for answering questions related to your product’s problem can get your potential traffic whom you can warm by other forms of internet marketing.
But for this to work, you need to do keyword research, topic research, and content framework analysis. Basically, everything that you do in traditional content marketing like blogging.
- Integrate brand mention strategy
Getting people talking about your brand has a significant impact on your brand growth.
This makes experimenting with brand mention techniques so critical. From influencer outreach to sponsored content to guest blogging, you can use many.
But at the core, the success lies with two simple elements, whom you partner with and how consistently you can do it. Registering on review platforms is also a great way to do this. Also, another way is to build broken links of your indirect competitors.
Using tools like SEMrush, you can utilize this efficiently. But to ensure your success, prioritize working on broken links of blog posts that have performed well with your competitors. This will create an opportunity for you to foster a long-term relationship with the competitor and gain new eyeballs.
The core idea is to reinforce your product’s value via your early adopters and authorities whom your audience already trusts.
Key takeaway
Now when you have in-depth SEO knowledge, it is time to put it to practice.
You now not only know what works today but have the insight to predict what can work tomorrow. However, that doesn’t mean that you do not need to test your ideas. But the key here is to stay firm on the foundational strengths of SEO that never fades away with changing algorithms.
No matter what the new metric dictates, your audience’s love will overrule them always. This means if you are connected with your audience, you will never go wrong. Always start with pleasing your audience. Every other metric comes later.
In the end, your SEO needs to be a combination of persuasion and narration techniques that help to satisfy the needs of business and audience, respectively.
About the Author
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Learning Experience Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband. In her free time, she loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at atreyee.c@gmail.com to discuss your content marketing plans and requirements.
