Three tips for better SEO?

1. Do Your Customer Avatar!

2. Understand Your CVJ!

3. Start Your Technical

SEO! Download your FREE CVJ toolkit here: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/lp/customer-value-journey/

Atiba de Souza is CEO of Client Attraction Pros, a video first content marketing agency, and DigitalMarketer Certified Partner

The post How to Use the Customer Value Journey for SEO with Atiba de Souza [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Content is considered to be the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.

What exactly does that mean?

Why is content so important for search engine optimization?

First Things First: What’s “Content Marketing?”

Content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content in order to drive brand awareness, traffic and sales.

Please note if your content isn’t valuable, relevant and consistent, it’s not content marketing. If it’s not driving profitable customer action, it’s not marketing.

Gone are the days when you could have just used your target keyword a certain number a times across your document to convince the algorithm that your content is relevant to that search query.

Google has come a long way since then.

Its innovative algorithm is implementing artificial intelligence to teach the algorithm to think like a human being. It is using a variety of signals to evaluate how useful any search result turned out to be.

There’s no faking true value any more.

Authentic value always comes first.

Why Content is So Important for SEO?

Content is traditionally fundamental to SEO because Google needs words and text to understand relevancy.

Even decades after Google algorithm was born and now that Google can now read visual and video content, Google still admits relying on text for the most part:

With that in mind, how exactly does Google understand quality and relevancy, when it comes to textual content?

What is High Quality Content?

Truly Useful Content

Number one, just be awesome at what you do. Google is getting better and better at being able to differentiate what people are really asking for.

Be very clear about who you are and what you do. It’s not guaranteed that you won’t run into those problems, but Google is getting better at figuring out the intent of a query and really finding what the best result should be.

Authenticity and transparency go a long way. It is not about faking relevance and quality signals. It’s about really solving the problems behind search queries.

As a result, it’s getting harder for affiliates and resellers to suck traffic away from brands in branded search queries, without the brand having to do much SEO improvement on their part.

Content and Link Building

There’s another distinct benefit of creating content for your business site: Content attracts links, and without links, there are no rankings.

Content-driven link building is the only safe link building out there: You generate links via creating linkable content. There are multiple formats and tactics behind creating linkable content, and you will need to experiment with all of them to find what works in your niche:

To help your content drive links, reach out to bloggers and journalists in your niche and invite them to read your content and link to it. This is a slightly overused but still perfectly legit and effective way to get backlinks. Use Hunter to easily find emails of bloggers’ and journalists’ you think would be interested in your content.

Their Email Verifier feature is also very useful for cleaning your existing email lists and getting more out of your outreach methods.

Content and SEO: They Only Win Together

So it is quite clear that SEO isn’t really possible without content.

Can content exist without SEO?

It actually can.

But unless you keep SEO in mind when creating content, you rely on a sheer chance to have it ever discovered or found.

When it comes to business and marketing, relying on luck is never a good strategy. You need data and planning to increase your odds of success, and that’s where SEO comes in handy.

It’s becoming much more important for content creators to understand how content is published and discovered on the Internet. In a way, optimizing your content for search is getting easier to understand and easier to integrate into the whole content creation process. 

Why would you create content and put it out there and have someone else come in and optimize it later? If you’re doing the content creation and putting it in a CMS or working with a developer to get it published, well why not integrate that stuff as you’re doing that along the way?

It is especially important for small companies, non-profits, and even government and higher education – those people who don’t have huge SEO resources. 

If content professionals can learn a small amount of basic SEO, they’ll get 90% of the way there. All of the other super heavy keyword analysis, back-linking profiles and pattern analysis, that’s what you do when you’ve already gotten 90% there.

Content + SEO Tools

There are quite a few SEO tools that can empower your content creation process and let your team make more informed marketing decisions. My favorites are:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a keyword research tool that relies on Google search data. It extends your search query and lets you discover what your competitors are ranking for. It is a great content ideation and optimization tool allowing you to see which problems and questions your target audience is struggling with.

2. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is a semantic research tool that takes your target queries and imports search snippets that come for it. Then it analyzes the text extract related concepts and entities letting you discover more topics and angles to cover.

Text Optimizer is a great tool to create lead magnets because it drives long-form in-depth content creation that tackles multiple angles within your chosen topic.

3. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics allows you to identify the most successful content to help you use the data to better understand your audience and focus on what works.

4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo includes lots of tools including content analysis and backlink research. The whole toolset focuses on content signals and authorship making it a great fit for content creators and media publishers.

5. Rank Tracker

With Rank Tracker, you can generate a ton of keyword ideas for your content, create keyword groups for landing pages, and set up rank monitoring for your and your competitors’ websites.

Bottom Line: Content Strategists Must not be Afraid of SEO

Fundamentally, content marketing is all about collaboration. Your content marketing should rely on SEO for ideation strategy and data but it also needs to be unique and creative. Content and SEO teams are both only as strong as their weakest links. The things you publish need to be found organically to break through today’s cacophony of content. Search, content, social, technology, UX and analytics all have to be working in perfect harmony, and so does your team. 

• If there is organization silos, your content will suffer.
• If you have inefficient workflows, your content will suffer.
• And if people don’t believe in your mission and values, your content will suffer.

Strong individuals build great teams. Great teams build great companies. SEO and content should work together to drive a successful digital marketing strategy.

The post Why SEO and Copywriting Go Hand in Hand appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

SEO is vital for any business, but how exactly can businesses use it to drive growth?

Search traffic is historically the best web traffic you can hope for.

Google has been the single most powerful traffic driver for ages, and while its power has been slowly declining of the years, no other traffic channel has come close to organic traffic:

Here’s how SEO can help your business in 2022:

Understand Your Customers Better

One of the immediate benefits of starting an SEO strategy is an ability to better understand (and relate to) people’s journeys around the web.

What is your target audience struggling with? What kind of questions are they asking? What drives their purchasing decisions?

A well-defined keyword research strategy can answer all those questions and enlighten your whole team.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools to perform keyword research because it offers so much useful data including, common modifiers, popular questions, SERP features and more:

You can also run your (or your competitor’s) domain through the tool to see your current positions in Google.

This can give you a more holistic understanding of your keyword rankings, and tell you how people are finding your business (or your competitor’s business) across multiple platforms.

Build More Detailed Buyers’ Personas

Customer personas (also referred to as customer avatar) are people you make up to describe your ideal customers.

Personas make digital marketing more streamlines and understandable by making your buyers easier to relate to. 

When creating a persona, you assign some human traits and features, like gender, income, occupation, etc.

Personas also help you create a customer-centric business model, the only business model that will make your business successful in 2022 and beyond.

To build a persona, you need some kind of data, and that’s where SEO-driven web analytics somes very much in handy. Google Analytics comes with detailed demographics data that will turn very useful for persona creation:

As a business owner, you are, of course, prioritizing your customers. Thus, their feedback is important for you to improve your product or service. In order to learn from your visitors, install Google Analytics tool that collects feedback so that you can analyze it and listen to your customers in order to make your website better. 

No matter how many professionals work on your website, visitors’ feedback is the most qualitative measure of your success. Using conversational forms on your site will help you collect even more data for your SEO campaigns and create more detailed personas.

Take Control of Your Buyers’ Journeys

Buying journeys have become more complicated over the years. Equipped with diverse devices and tools, a consumer may start their journey on one device and continue on a different one. 

They are likely to turn to Google multiple times throughout that fragmented journey, and if your business shows up for multiple queries in multiple sections, you are more likely to win that customer:

A well set-up SEO strategy is targeting more than just organic results. It aims at optimizing the whole SERP (search engine result page):

Take a look at all those sections:

Most of them provide businesses with additional opportunities to get found and engaged with. For example, ranking in the Google Video Carousel can help you with conversions as videos present products and services in an accessible way. Nowadays, editing videos can be done with an online video editor and a simple keyword research and video page optimization can help you bring it among the top SERPs.

A critical cog in the wheel of customer relationships is how well you integrate the online-offline experience of the customer. Every interaction your customer has with your brand doesn’t result in a sale. Neither does every Google search they do. However, engagement is a virtual cycle — more brand awareness means more branded searches and more branded searches mean better visibility, rankings, and ultimately, clicks.

So the best thing for you to do would be to understand (and match) customers’ “intent” at every interaction. Again, this requires alignment between your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Using the right CRM software, you can consolidate the results of your SEO, email marketing and lead generation campaigns, create your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, and funnel back the insights into your content creation process to target them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Identify Your Promoters

If you are into SEO, you sure know your backlinks. But backlinks are not just about higher rankings. Knowing who links to you helps you build stronger niche relationships!

Ahrefs is a great tool for understanding your website’s structure and its backlink portfolio. Essentially, your website’s backlink portfolio is all the websites that have linked from their site back to yours. 

Another great tool is Buzzsumo that allows you to see exactly who is linking to you, and even the author who was found on that page. You can see what content on your website is the most popular, which is especially useful if you incorporate a blog into your website.

You can also set up an alert to receive an email once anyone is linking to your site. This is a great relationship building tactic: Once anyone links to you, reach out to thank, follow and become a friend!

Control Online Context and Sentiment Better

Finally, being there, paying attention to what people see when searching and trying to optimize for that will empower your business with ways to control what people see when searching for your brand or your important queries.

Imagine your current or future customer typing your brand name in Google’s search box. What are they going to see there? How will that impact their buying journey?

Whether you are there or not, your current and potential customers are searching for you and your brand. The difference is, when you are there watching, you can make your business better and make sure you provide the best solutions to their answers.

Conclusion

Of course, SEO offers many more ways to help your business in 2022, including an ability to position your brand as a knowledge hub by driving your content creation decision. 

On top of that, SEO allows you to create the most consistent traffic channel out there. Organic traffic is one of the most valuable traffic-driving channels out there thanks to matching intent (users actually search for answers and solutions, so they are more likely to engage with your site if you give them those answers and solutions).

Customers expect brands to run websites where they can read more about a product or a service, get useful tips from your brand, or find FAQ sections to save time. If you’re about to set up your business, think about ‘budget’ ways to launch a user-friendly website as it helps to grow your business.

The best advice is to do some research, find the tools that work best for you, and never underestimate the value SEO offers for the success of your business.

The post How Can SEO Help Your Business in 2022? appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of digital marketing.

SEO helps with brand discoverability. When done right, SEO can create the most consistent and by far the highest-quality traffic source which doesn’t require on-going maintenance.

Yet, SEO is usually the most isolated part of the marketing. Whether it is an in-house team or a third-party service that’s delivering your SEO campaigns, it usually exists on its own without really communicating goals, progress, or results to the whole company.

This creates silos that can lead to poor results and even reputation crises.

How does SEO work in digital marketing and how can a business make it work better?

What is SEO?

SEO is a collection of tactics (content, technical, link building, even website security and usability) that ensures that your website is easy to understand for search engines.

Basically, it ensures a machine knows that your page will be easy to find to a human being who is looking to solve a related problem.

Search engine traffic is one of the highest-quality traffic for many reasons:

• Unlike PPC (paid) traffic, it doesn’t require an ongoing investment to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic,  it doesn’t require an ongoing work to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic, you are not interrupting people’s browsing. Instead you give them what they were actually searching for.

In other words, it is consistent and it converts well. No other digital marketing tactic beats that.

Apart from driving direct traffic, search engine optimization helps build brand awareness by increasing your brand’s organic findability.

Keep Your Whole Team Aware of Why SEO is Important

The great thing about today is that everyone understands the value of ranking high on Google! Sadly, however, many folks only know that they “need SEO” without having really understood what that means. 

SEO these days is too hard for a digital marketer to do alone. Many SEOs find themselves in situations where an executive will simply come down and go “Why are we not ranking well for ‘dingwobble’?” 

Keep working hard with teams for them to understand how they contribute to the SEO process:

• Product Marketers who are responsible for the business, personas and messaging understand that SEO is critical to driving the bottom line revenue numbers they are looking at. Part of the persona developing process should be the development of the “digital persona” – what websites and search terms are these people looking for? This helps the product marketer when it comes time to develop messaging, as that is going to be critical for developing the content, so the right search terms better be there!
• Field Marketers responsible for the campaigns need to know how SEO fits within their campaign, how it in fact is core to our demand generation, and how to make sure to keep the campaigns integrated.
• Marketing Communications is creating the content, so SEO should very well be top of mind for them, as the content itself will be critical in impacting how successful SEO will be.
• But that’s not all! Often, other groups are creating content (Press Releases, Blog Posts, Presentations, etc.) that also end up on the web and impact SEO. Whether it’s Corporate Communications, Investor Relations or even Legal teams, working with them is critical.
• IT manages the infrastructure and can be very critical to the technical aspects of SEO.
• Sales and customer support teams are at the forefront of marketing talking to your future and current customers, so they need to be involved in the SEO strategy. Creating relevant content goes beyond keywords. It needs to address real problems and answer actual people’s questions, and your client-facing teams will be your best source of inspiration here.  
• Executives also care! While they can’t often influence the day-to-day of SEO, they will care a lot about the bottom line, to which SEO contributes.

Educating all of these people about SEO helps empower them, as well as position yourself, the SEO, as the subject matter expert who is not just someone back-office who gives very little visibility into the black box of SEO, but someone who is actively educating and contributing to the organization’s success.

Review and discuss common KPIs early and often to make sure everyone knows what victory looks like to the team.

Additionally, SEO should be a solid part of any project launch as it impacts every stage of product positioning. From choosing a business name to choosing a website builder, your initial efforts should be driven by SEO best practices.

What is the key to SEO success in a constantly changing environment?

As a practitioner of SEO, I believe that you need to look to ensure you are looking at both developing yourself in both depth and breadth of knowledge. A key danger in the name of being informed or being a part of the SEO community is spending all your time debating tactics and practices rather than testing them. 

Additionally, SEOs as with all employees need to look outside their field to stretch and learn how to be more well rounded. This could mean learning to code, or educating yourself in some other area of the business you work for.  This will expose you to ideas others may not have.

As a manager of people, success is really about diversity of expertise. Who you hire and the kind of people you hire will be far more valuable than much of what people invest in with regards to SEO programs. You have to have people who can roll with the punches and develop a skill for self-management and personal growth. 

Finally, I think knowing what your real goals are in having an SEO program are the key to long term success. The reality is you may get more traffic, but if that traffic is not from qualified leads and generates real revenue then the benefit may be very little. Having well defined goals and metrics will also help you avoid chasing algorithm changes and focus on the big picture.

Conclusion

SEO is the most essential long-term digital marketing strategy but to make it really effective, you need a knowledge team that is well-integrated into the company’s life. Good luck!

The post Why SEO Still Matters for Your Entire Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Without SEO, publishing content online is like sending a rocket to space without a destination.

If you don’t tell that rocket which direction to head (the moon or Mars?), you’re stuck crossing your fingers and hoping things work out. That’s not good marketing. Good marketing comes with predictability, data, and then some crossed fingers.

And that’s the perfect way to describe search engine optimization, SEO, in 2022. 

SEO is part of the search engine algorithm: 

Input = Keywords

Output = Content

For every keyword, there are thousands of pages of search results and plenty of content to choose from (outputs). But, page 1,000 isn’t nearly as useful as page 1. Even page 2 of search results can feel like no man’s land. 

That’s why marketers care about SEO. Because all search engine pages are not equal. The power of ranking top 3 on page 1 of a search engine beats out ranking first on page 2 by 100x (honestly, maybe even 1,000x). 

How do you land a coveted spot on page 1 of the search results?

By picking the right SEO keywords through these three steps.

3 Steps SEO Experts Use to Pick Keywords

SEO has been around long enough that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A new, innovative, never-before-seen SEO strategy that takes you months to implement and even longer to see results is the opposite of what SEO experts are doing.

The SEO experts writing high-quality content, landing on page 1 for relevant searches, and seeing results from their content are the ones following this tried-and-true SEO strategy.

#1: Ideate Keywords

There are two types of advertising: interruption-based and intent-based. Interruption-based advertising is an ad on your social media newsfeed. It’s the ads between paragraphs on the news article you’re trying to read. It’s a search engine ad strategically placed before the organic results. This isn’t your focus in organic SEO marketing, but this IS your focus in paid SEO advertising.

In SEO marketing, you’re focused on intent-based advertising. When somebody chooses to search for an answer to their question—that’s intent-based advertising. A search for “olive green cotton blanket” is an example of intent-based advertising. 

And the search engine results are a mix of interruption (paid ads) and intent-based advertising (organic results).

When you’re ideating keywords for your products and brand, you’re looking at intent-based words. These are the words somebody needs to use to find your products or brand. For DigitalMarketer, these are words like:

• Digital marketing training
• Digital marketing help
• Content marketing training
• Copywriting training

These keywords correlate directly to our products. They teach people how to be great digital marketers, either for their own company, their full-time marketing role, marketing consultancy, or their agency clients.

Your customer avatar asks specific questions and uses certain words to describe to search engines what content they want output. Use these questions to make a list of 20+ keywords you could rank for:

1. What questions do your customers ask surrounding your products or brand?
2. What single words would your customers use to describe your product or brand?
3. What phrases would your customers use to describe your product or brand?

These questions will give you a page full of keywords and keyword phrases (several words used in a search query) that you want to rank for.

Once you have those keywords, go to AnswerThePublic.com and automatically generate a list of questions people have asked search engines related to those keywords. See if there are any other keywords or keyword phrases you missed—and take notes of the questions people are asking. Those questions will be the topics of your content.

For example, if we see people asking “how to pick SEO keywords,” our team knows that content on picking SEO keywords is a great addition to our online library. You don’t want to chase every keyword that looks like a great piece of content, though. 

First, you need to research the best keywords to see which are worth spending your time on.

#2: Research the Best Keywords

With your list of keywords and keyword phrases (which should be looooooooong by now), you’re set up to figure out which keywords to put your focus on. Unlike your pets, you’re allowed to play favorites here. You don’t want to choose keywords that are highly saturated and difficult to rank for. You also want to avoid the keywords that will only capture a minuscule part of your audience (at least, at first). 

Time to bring in more help from our robot friends. Research the best keywords with tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and seriously, there are so many other awesome SEO tools out there.

Here’s what keyword research for “running shoes” looks like in SEMRush:

A few things to take note of to compare your keywords/phrases and see which are the best option:

• Volume is key to understanding if this keyword is worth creating content on or if it’s better to choose something with a higher search volume.
• The keyword difficulty score shows you how hard it will be to organically rank for that keyword (good luck on getting on page 1 for running shoes!).
• Use Keyword Variations to figure out if there are other keywords you can try to rank for that are similar but less competitive.

You can also use tools like Google Trends to see which times of the year certain searches spike. For example, the keyword phrase “plants for desk” had its highest search volume between July 27th and July 3rd. From October to the end of November, it has the lowest search volume.

This data can tell you what time is the best to push interruption-based search paid ads—and if there’s specific content you can create around the seasons or months where you see these spikes.

Once you know which keywords you’re going all-in on, it’s time for a quick chat with your finance team.

#3: Check Bid Estimates (For Paid Advertising)

If you’re not putting money behind your SEO strategy and aiming to get organic traffic through high-ranking content, skip to the next section. If you’re looking to put your ad budget towards SEO, keep reading. 

Once you’ve narrowed down the keywords to prioritize based on factors like search volume and difficulty score, it’s time to run your keywords through their last filter: cost. Every keyword comes at a different cost to win the ad auction. The ad auction is how Google determines which ad trying to rank for the same keyword wins an ad placement depending on the user. 

It’s based on 3 factors:

1. Your Bid: This is your maximum budget for an ad click. 
2. Ad Quality: Google won’t show your ad to everybody searching for your keyword—they’ll show it to the people most likely to click based on past behavior and data they have on the user.
3. Extensions and Ad Formats: Google likes when you use extensions, like phone number and other links, as well as the other ad formats you’ve chosen and can boost you in the auction for a lower price.

Understanding how the auction works is necessary to figuring out how much you can afford to spend on ads and what your expected ROI should be. For example, in the SEMRush example for the search “running shoes” the cost-per-click is estimated to be $0.84. This tells you that if you want 10 clicks on your ad per day, you need a minimum $8.40 budget. Of course these numbers are a lot smaller than what you’ll really be working with, but this gives you an idea of how to figure out your SEO budget. 

This is why Step 3 is so important. If your SEO budget is $100 per day, you don’t want to splurge on keywords with a cost-per-click of $10 each (unless you’re certain they’ll lead to conversions!). Instead, you want to create a broader strategy that encompasses several keywords and keyword phrases that make up your $100 per day budget. 

You can use Google Keyword Planner to get suggested bid amounts per keyword: 

You have your keywords, researched and ready to go. There’s only one more thing left to do.

What Do You Do After Picking SEO Keywords?

After you’ve chosen your SEO keywords, it’s time to create the content and ads. There are 3 types of content and ads to create:

1. Top-of-funnel content
2. Middle-of-funnel content
3. Bottom-of-funnel content

Top-of-Funnel Content and Ads

When your customer avatar is first introduced to your brand, show them top-of-funnel content (TOFU). Think of this content as the getting to know you phase relationships (professional, family, friends, or even with your pets!). Every relationship goes through a stage of learning more about someone’s goals, values, and challenges. Your customer avatar wants to know who your brand is, what your goals are, and if your values align with theirs. They’re also looking to see if you understand their challenges.

Here’s an example of TOFU at DigitalMarketer: What is Digital Marketing? In this article, we’re introducing the reader to digital marketing which means we’re not trying to turn them into a customer just yet. It’s not the right time. 

And the same applies to paid ads. You’re looking to educate at the top-of-the-funnel. Check out how these productivity apps use the limited amount of space on their ad to educate Google users about their productivity app.

Middle-of-funnel content and ads take things a step further.

Middle-of-Funnel Content and Ads

Middle-of-funnel content (MOFU) and ads are still educating the reader, but they’re *really* hinting at the product. The productivity apps above had to talk about their product in their TOFU content (they didn’t have another choice), but there’s a difference between their TOFU content and their MOFU content.

At the MOFU level, they’re flaunting their features and actively talking about why the competition isn’t the best option. An example of our MOFU content is this Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing. This guide is LONG, and anybody reading it clearly trusts us as their teacher. This content is designed to build a stronger relationship with this lead and get them to give us their email address (so we can send them even more valuable content). 

Notice the “Download as PDF” button? If you click that, a pop-up form appears asking for your First name, last name, email address AND two questions:

1. Are you an agency or marketing consultant?
2. Do you manage a sales and/or marketing team?

These two questions help us tag our email subscribers so we know which content, products, and offers are best suited for them. We can build out specific funnels based on their responses and get first-party data that we can continue using in the future (take that iOS 14!).

Bottom-of-Funnel Content and Ads

Bottom-of-funnel content (BOFU) and ads have a direct call-to-action to join, buy, or sign-up. There isn’t any fluff. Think of this as a sales page—there’s only one action to take on that page and it involves contact information or a credit card.

For the search, “mailchimp vs. constant contact vs. sendinblue,” Constant Contact created a BOFU ad. How can you tell?

• They’re giving you a special offer to sign up now
• They’re promoting their 60-day full access, free trial
• Their link extensions are promoting product features

BOFU content cuts straight to the chase. 

Every great SEO strategy involves these 3 types of content. 

You’re Ready to Pick Your SEO Keywords

You don’t have to classify yourself as an expert before you choose your keywords. You finished this article which means—you’re ready. You have the 3 steps to follow:

1. Ideate Keywords
2. Research the Best Keywords
3. Check Bid Estimates (For Paid Advertising)

And you know what to do after you’ve chosen them (create TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content and ads). The only thing left to do is put what you’ve learned into practice. Remember that every SEO marketer started where you were, unsure how to use the Google ads platform and scared they’ll run through their marketing budget without an ROI.

Just like we’re not telling you to put your entire life savings into Gamestop stock, putting your entire ad budget into your first SEO strategy is the wrong move. Take a percentage of that budget and start testing out ads, seeing their CTR, and how much each keyword or keyword phrase costs.

Build up from there. If you take this route, you’ll feel comfortable enough with your SEO strategy to add another story on top of it, and another in the future, and eventually you’ll have a solid building on your hands. That’s when you’ll look back at yourself reading this article and think—wow, that was just the beginning.

The post Picking SEO Keywords: An Expert’s Guide appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Do you want to increase your website’s rankings? SEO is a powerful way to do this. On page SEO refers to the content on your website, and it can take time and patience to get it right. In this blog post, we will go over three tips for optimizing SEO on your website so that you can rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP).

These tips are the foundational pieces that I have used for my business and clients that flat out get results.

SILOing Your Content

A big part of search engine optimization is creating content. One mistake people make is not structuring that content properly so it is easily followed. The first thing you need to know is how to structure the content so when someone comes to the site they can easily navigate and find the content they are looking for.

The best way to do this is through SILOing your content.

What is SILOing you ask?

SILOing stands for “siloing information.” It’s the process of organizing website content in a hierarchical manner. On each page, you have to provide links that lead users down a hierarchy, or order, of topics or subtopics.

I like to draw it out on a white board and make it look like an organizational chart.

Here is an example of what a hiearchy would look like:

The main topic of focus for the entire website is right at the top. Below the main topic, start creating subtopics. I like to keep the subtopics to 5 or less in the beginning. Then, underneath each subtopic, start writing all the potential things you can write about on that particular topic.

If you have a hard time  coming up with things to write about, go to websites like answerthepublic.com or quora.com and search the subtopic. Then just write down all the questions that come up and answer them.

How long should each article or piece of content be for SEO?

There are many answers to this question depending on where you focus. From our experience with clients, we have found that top-performing content is at least 1200 words and that content should not be less than 800 words. If content is under 800 words, it typically performs poorly in rankings.

Now with SILOing, you can use multiple pieces of content in a “series” like format to get the word count up.

The idea behind having this much content is that you want to build authority on the topic.

Google hasn’t really come out and said 800 – 1200 words is the mark, but if you can easily write 1200 words on a topic it shows that you know a little of what you are talking about, Google likes that.

As for keywords and getting all that in there. Each piece of content should be themed towards a question or single topic that falls under that sub topic. This makes it really easy for keyword strategy.

What I tell my clients is to not worry about making sure the right keywords are in the right place. I tell them to focus more on providing high quality content that is easily consumable. The keywords will appear where they need to.

You want your content to be organic, authentic, and easy to read and understand. The more you focus on this, the better your content will be and the higher it will rank.

As you build out your SILO visually, it’ll be easier to also connect the dots across categories where you can provide internal links for additional content to better strengthen your content.

Once you have content written the next thing you should put focus on is Rich Data snippets, or Schema Markup.

Schema Markup

What is schema markup?

Schema markup is a way to structure your content for search engines. On the internet, there are different types of data that websites can use, and it’s important to be able to “mark them up” so that they’re easily understood by search engine crawlers.

There are two main things you need schema markup for – reviews & people or organizations.

Of course there are other areas such as videos, FAQ’s, breadcrumbs, etc.

The type of site you have will dictate how in depth you want to go with the schema or structured data snippets.

The way Google likes to see it is in the JSON format.

Now I know what you are saying…”that sounds super techie and I don’t want to do it.”

I’m here to tell you…yes it is techie and you must do it!

Luckily there are a ton of plugins and websites that will write this for you and all you have to do is give the information.

The website I like to use and have clients use is https://technicalseo.com/tools/. 

This website has a bunch of other tools to help with your robots file, sitemap and htaccess file.So you can leave the real techie stuff to the software. All you need to worry about is copy and pasting it into the right place.

The really cool thing about schema is not a lot of websites do it. If you are in a niche, especially a local niche (ie. HVAC, Hotel, dentist, massage therapist, etc.) you will easily beat out your competition just by adding schema to your site.

Just remember, Google will always serve you when you give them as much information as possible in their preferred format. In many cases, this will be the sole reason you outrank the competition.

There are many other factors in getting high rankings for your website, but having well-written structured data is one of the big factors that Google looks at.

Now that we have awesome content that is structured with a SILO, and the site is properly marked up with Schema, we must continue with providing that great user experience.

The best way we go about doing that is making sure the site loads fast.

Website Loading Speed

One of the main things that affects website ranking is how fast the site loads.

Google has said that they are using page speed as a ranking factor.

There are many things you can do to increase your website’s loading time, such as optimizing images, compressing files, and caching static content.

Using sites such as GTMetrix will give you an awesome idea on where you can get started with your speed optimization and what is going to make the biggest impact right away.

Once you have made the adjustments, I always cross reference through Google’s PageSpeed tool to make sure I am doing the right things and getting the desired results.

Another thing you can do is use a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN is a service that distributes your website’s files across multiple servers located around the world. This speeds up the loading time by serving the files from the closest server to the visitor.

There are many different CDNs available, such as CloudFlare and MaxCDN. I like to use CloudFlare because it’s free and easy to set up.

One Last Recommendation

This bonus tip is to make sure you have a Google Search Console, formerly known as webmaster tools, account. You can use this to check your crawl rate and see if there are any errors you need to fix on the site. On top of that, it’s great for getting feedback from Google about how they view your website.

Just by doing these few things, you can greatly improve your website’s loading time and boost your SEO rankings.

SEO is not a one time fix and it’s an on-going process. You must always be working to improve your website’s ranking. These are just a few of the things you can do to get started.

EJ Saunders

EJ has been in the digital marketing world since 2008 and founded his company Blaze Digital Solutions in March of 2020. Over the years he has worked with a variety of different businesses and is personally responsible for generating well over $10 million in sales with digital ads and SEO. 
EJ and his team at Blaze Digital act as a bolt on marketing team and help their clients businesses scale. His mission is to help at least 10 businesses generate $10 million annually in the next 10 years.  

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