The New Rules for a Winning SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization is in a constant state of flux, with no clear-cut rules to follow. Marketers have been keeping their eye on changes that help improve their search engine ranking by incorporating updated recommendations. In this article, we’ll be giving you all the new tips that you’ll need to create a winning SEO strategy. 

Your New SEO Strategy

Let’s dive into the in’s and out’s developing your updated SEO strategy. If there is one thing you take away from this article, let it be this: SEO favors expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. These three elements need to be the foundation and applied throughout your strategy. 

Use Research As a Starting Point 

Research is important when it comes to SEO. This ensures that you are not creating content for a bubble, but instead understanding the market. That is to say, you need to have keyword research conducted. You should be analyzing what your competitors are doing and which posts are currently ranking on the first page of searches. This will inform you as to what’s working and what you need to be doing. 

You also need to be conducting ongoing research about your audience. They are ever-changing and so are their needs. You need first-hand research to fully understand what they’re searching for and how to best cater to that. It’s all about making sure the content works for them - it needs to be accurate and well-presented. Search engines value quality, so ensure you’re meeting those standards at the very least. It needs to be relevant and well-crafted to appeal to audiences and hold their attention. 

Featured Snippets and the No-Click Searches 

You can reach the top of search engines by paying for search ads. However, the content you create can get there organically. To do this, the content should be able to answer the question directly. The best example of this gets featured as a snippet at the top of search pages. This can be text-based, although it can apply to images and products to show too, so be sure to optimize all content wherever possible.

Also, be sure to have your Google Business profile accurately filled in so that people can easily find relevant information about your business without having to search for it on your website. These tips work in tandem with the fact that search engines are becoming a destination, providing the searcher with everything they need, without having to click on website links. Therefore, all of your information needs to be primed for these, especially since Google has reported that as many as half of all searches have been answered with zero clicks. 

To achieve success with this, you’ve got to use strong keywords to secure your spot and while this new approach to search detracts from website traffic, it can help with brand awareness, so having a clear and memorable URL or information that people want to click through to learn more about it key. 

Keep Content Fresh

Content drives SEO. That said, one should not only be focused on publishing new content. Since content marketing has long-term payoffs, you’ve got to ensure that the existing content you have is updated. This will help retain the rankings for a particular post while giving viewers the confidence to know that it is not outdated. 

All content needs to be optimized to increase organic views. This includes having embedded links, keywords, and evergreen stats. While focusing on how to optimize your content fully, you should also keep the factors limiting your search ranking in mind. To do this, your team should conduct an SEO audit and make changes where necessary. This could include fixing broken links and pages and improving the speed at which the pages load. 

Look At the Bigger Picture

When gaining authority, you’ve got to think about how far your content reaches. That is to say, digital PR can do you wonders since this provides you with authentic external backlinks. This can strengthen your site’s authority and position. You can also achieve this by being featured on the websites of your clients and partners. 

When considering the bigger picture, you also need to consider how your content is consumed. Some will be viewing your website via their mobile devices, and others will be using a PC. Your content needs to be seamlessly responsive and adaptive to various devices and providing a great user experience. 

The Future of Search

With more voice searches occurring online, many marketers are optimizing their content accordingly. To do this, you need to keep your text easy to read and follow. Speech recognition tools work well with quality articles that are well written and structured (much like general SEO practices). Keep in mind that many voice search queries include long-tail keywords with specific requests.

Video content also has a positive effect on SEO. Videos should be included where they form a relevant fit to the keyword, whether it’s on a landing page or blog post. Videos need to be optimized too, from the channel name to the description and tags. 

Presentation and Context Matters

Long gone are the days of keyword stuffing and verbosity filling up word counts to rank. Today’s searchers want to have context available to them, which is why long-form content is still the way to go for higher rankings. This needs to present them with an in-depth look at a topic, which can then send them down the rabbit hole of many sub-topics - think pillar pages with topic clusters for this. 

Today’s searchers are looking for fully-fledged content that includes all sorts of relevant multimedia to help portray the information, be it graphics or videos. To get their attention, metadata is key since it can entice a viewer to click the link and helps search engine crawlers to scan and recommend the content. This means your titles, descriptions, and reviews need to be carefully considered and optimized. Alongside this, including schema code (which you can easily generate online) helps the content to be indexed accordingly. 

The Rules to Win With SEO

Overall, you need to be optimizing content to suit today’s searchers. It begins with the technical structure of your website and is an ongoing endeavor that includes both historical and new content. The goal is to reach the first page of search engines. Ready to get there? Book a meeting with us at Nexa, we’d love to help you get there.