Like every journey, your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign has a higher likelihood for success if you begin on sure footing. Hence this list of 5 SEO techniques that will send you rising through the ranks and gaining all the traffic you need in 2018.
SEE ALSO: 6 Ancient SEO Tactics that No Longer Work
1. Prioritize a Topic-Centered Approach to Creating Content
Traditionally, SEO practice has always been built from one common starting point: finding keywords, and optimizing content around those keywords.
You target high volume, low competition keywords and incorporate them into your content so that search engines can understand what your content is about, and you can rise up the rankings due to the lack of competition.
While keyword research is still necessary, many experts believe you will see better results by switching to creating topic-centered content rather than keyword-centered content.
Google’s search algorithms have improved to the point where they are now very good at understanding the topics to which various keywords relate. So rather than stuffing a bunch of keywords in your content, you should try to incorporate the underlying topics attached to those keywords instead. These topics are what Google relates to the “parent topic” (the topic associated with the highest volume keyword).
A bonus of creating content in this manner is that you are likely to rank for dozens of long-tail keywords in the process.
2. Make Use of Facebook Advertising and Lookalike Audiences
SEE ALSO: 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Facebook Advertising
Facebook is still a digital marketer’s dream for many reasons including the low costs of ads and significant returns. However, there are other more advanced features which, once you learn how to leverage, can make Facebook advertising even more profitable for you as a marketer. One of these is the lookalike audience, which is simply an audience which Facebook’s algorithm creates based on a source audience or an audience you have identified as your most valuable.
By creating value-based lookalike audiences, Facebook enables you to direct your ad spend towards customers who are most valuable to you and promise high ROI.
To start using this feature, simply assign a value to different groups of your current customers, assigning the highest values to your most valuable customers. Facebook’s algorithm will then take this information and help you find a similar high-return audience to advertise to.
3. Re-Optimize Existing Content
If you are constantly adding new articles to your blog, or your website is already a content-creating supernova, you may be sitting on an untapped gold mine. Once an article is published, many people simply forget about it and move quickly onto the next one.
But every once in awhile (quarterly, half-year or annually) you should consider conducting a content audit on your site. A content audit is an audit where you improve articles, merge them together, or even remove them.
There are dozens of opportunities for re-optimizing existing content on your site and continuing to reap the benefits of it. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to judge the effectiveness of past articles and pages.
4. Create and Promote Linkable Assets
Linkable assets are great because of the backlinks they can potentially earn you from other websites, which will in turn give you a massive SEO boost.
To create one, you simply have to produce a super valuable resource for your target audience, one that other websites would gladly link to. And the promotion can be done through blogger outreach and paid promotion tactics involving 3rd party media like social media.
5. Manage Your 404 Redirects
When you make major changes to your website, developers often make changes to the website’s URL structure for any number of reasons. In order not to lose SEO gains made by the old site, managing your redirects is therefore vitally important.
301 redirects pass on the link equity from your old, no-longer-existing page to the new page, and without them you can kiss your rankings and hard-earned traffic goodbye.
A tool like Ahrefs can help you find all existing pages on your site that are in need of redirects.
Want to chat about upping your SEO game in 2018 and beyond? Contact us today.
