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The 4 Pillars of an effective SEO to Stand Out in 2020

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How many ranking factors are involved in generating strong organic search results? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Two hundred?

 

A quick search for “SEO ranking factors” will give you answers for this.

 

There are likely hundreds of variables working together to determine final placement. And importantly not all ranking factors are relevant to every business.

 

 

 

Creating an SEO Strategy That Works

 

In digital marketing, SEO has grown hugely over the past 15 years.

 

SEO is evolved into a fully-fledged, user-centric digital marketing channel.

 

 

But still SEO remains as a fairly misunderstood discipline.

 

Marketing managers and business owners have different interpretations of how you actually ‘do’ SEO.

 

How we developed the four SEO pillars

 

Through the years, we’ve worked to maintain strong SEO results for our clients. We’ve tried new things, adopted new strategies for success.

 

Our experience made us develop this framework by which you can optimise your website successfully. The structure is based on 4 pillars.

 

In this article, I want to simplify four main areas you should focus on with your SEO. Follow these strategies for success!

 

 

The four pillars of SEO

 

The four key areas of SEO that site owners need to consider are:

 

  1. technical SEO: How well your content can be crawled and indexed.
  2. content: Having the most relevant and best answers to a prospect’s question.
  3. on-site SEO: The optimization of your content and HTML.
  4. off-site SEO: Building authority to ensure Google stacks the deck in your favor.

 

These four areas have some complexity and overlap, but in relation to your strengths and weaknesses in focusing your efforts.

 

1. Technical SEO

 

Technical SEO ensures that a search engine can read your content and explore your site.

 

All this will be taken care of by the content management system you are using, and tools like Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl will explore your website and highlight your technical problems.

 

The main areas to consider here are:

 

  1. Crawl – Can a search engine explore your site?
  2. Index – Is it clear which pages the search engine should index and return?
  3. Mobile – Does your site adapt for mobile users?
  4. Speed – Fast page load times are a crucial factor in keeping your visitors happy.
  5. Tech – Are you using search engine-friendly tech or CMS for your website?
  6. Hierarchy – How is your content structured on your website?

 

Are you a small business using WordPress for your website?

 

Technical SEO should be something you can check off your list pretty hassle free.

 

If you are a large website with millions of pages, then technical SEO becomes the most essential factor.

 

Much of what is considered “technical SEO” is a part of your website design and development.

 

 

2. On-site SEO optimization

 

Your website should be optimized completely and also at an individual page level.

 

For your site, you have to start with a well-structured content hierarchy.

 

I Assume that you have a well-structured site, again applying sensible optimization is relatively straightforward.

 

The main areas to focus on here are:

 

  1. keyword research – Understand the language of your target audience.
  2. descriptive URLs – Ensure each URL is simple and descriptive.
  3. page titles – Use keywords naturally within the page title. 
  4. meta descriptions – Craft meta descriptions like they were ad copy to drive clicks.
  5. content optimization – Sensibly use keywords and variations in your page copy.
  6. good user experience (UX) – Ensure your site is a joy to use and navigate.
  7. strong calls to action – Make it easy for your users to know what to do next.
  8. structured data markup – Tap into the latest SERP features to improve click-through rates.

 

You have to consider your customers when optimising your site.

 

If you own a local business, then local SEO is more important, and your address and location will become crucial optimization points.

 

With solid technical SEO, layering your on-page optimization is straightforward.

 

Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl and identify weaknesses then work through your pages.

 

 

3. Content

 

Content is the king. Yes It’s true in a way. Your website is just a wrapper for your unique content.

 

Your content can tell everything about what you do, where you do it, who you have done it for, and why others should use your business.

 

And if you’re smart, your content will also go beyond this usual brochure-type elements and help you to achieve your goals.

 

For service businesses, we can break your content into three categories as follows:

 

  1. Service content – What you do and where you do it.
  2. Credibility content – Why a prospect should engage with your business.
  3. Marketing content – Content that helps position you as an expert and puts your business in front of prospects earlier in the buying cycle.

 

You have to realize that SEO is important for all kinds of content, but it is often considered for only service-type content.

 

We forget SEO in credibility content like reviews, testimonials and case studies.

 

Ensure that you optimize all your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio entries and testimonials and not only just the service pages.

 

A solid content marketing and SEO strategy is effective to promote your business to a wide audience.

 

This has the best ROI, and no cost per click. So you can scale your marketing without directly scaling your costs.

 

This kind of SEO strategy is not right for all types of businesses, but if you find it as a good fit for you, it’s unbeatable.

 

Here are the key takeaways:

 

  1. Optimize all content across the entire customer journey.
  2. Determine whether content marketing via organic search is a good fit.

 

We still find too many paint-by-numbers approaches to SEO, where local business pay agencies to create blog posts that may not strategically fit.

 

Ensure that all your content is optimized, and if you are doing content marketing, ensure that it fits in your marketing tactics.

 

 

4. Off-site authority building

 

Finally all the SEO reach out to this one spot: authority building. Building your authority, in large part, involves link building.

 

Links are a crucial component in strong organic rankings; but link is the hardest part of SEO.

 

While link building is a vast topic and we can’t cover everything in depth here, if you could develop a positive link-building philosophy, then you are actually ahead of the majority of your competitions.

 

The best way to describe the right link-building mindset is written by the late, great Eric Ward: “Connect what should be connected.”

 

This philosophy is beautiful in simple words, and it serves correct to the “more, more, more” mentality of link building.

 

You have to use links from relevant sources only. In order to scale our link-building efforts beyond the obvious tactics, we need to create something that deserves links.

 

Wikipedia has got millions of links, but they have never done any link building. This is because they have useful content that is linked.

 

They are real, natural links that enrich the linking page, provide context and serve as like the connective tissue to this hyperlinked world.

 

This natural link should be the backbone of your link-building efforts.

 

This states that you have to revisit the content on your site and create value first.

 

Any safe, scalable link-building strategy should be built on this mindset.

 

Key takeaways here:

 

  1.   Make sure you are building the kind of real links that make sense in the real world and won’t upset the qualitative and sometimes punitive parts of the algorithm.
  2.   Ensure you have content that deserves to rank and deserves to be linked to.

Wrapping up

 

SEO does not need to be complex. These are the four key areas of SEO that you need to consider, and there is a structured, methodical process you can follow to optimize your site.

 

I hope this post helps you to improve your rankings and generate more business from organic search!

 

Learn complete SEO Course at Zuan, SEO job training institute in Chennai.

 

Corona or no Corona, never stop learning.

 

Enroll now to achieve your dream job!

 

 

The post The 4 Pillars of an effective SEO to Stand Out in 2020 appeared first on SEO Job Training.


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