Six or seven years ago, I had no idea what SEO was. I’d hear it mentioned, but it was just another acronym in the collection of Internet jargon.
Today, I’ve worked with several businesses to take their website from non-existent SEO implementation to increases in organic traffic of upwards of 200%.
Organic search is the leading potential source of traffic to your web traffic. It beats out all other channels in my personal experience.
And did you know that organic search traffic has a close or conversion rate that is 13% higher than among leads resulting from outbound marketing efforts? SEO is a powerful driver of inbound marketing.
How to do SEO, and do it exceptionally at that, is a common topic of discussion when I’m working with brand managers, content marketers, or even front-end website UX designers.
The most important thing you need to know about how to do SEO in order to rank higher in search engine results is more simple than you could imagine.
The trick to how to do SEO is just to write valuable content.
That’s it.
But writing valuable content isn’t quite as straightforward as one might think. You really have to think about the user experience of someone who’s visiting your website and looking for content.
Google is looking for the best content to deliver to people performing searches. That’s the motive behind all the different algorithmic updates and changes, as difficult as those can be to keep up with for marketers.
So if a web page is filled with irrelevant content, copy or images, it’s not going to be perceived by search engines to be of high value.
There used to be a time when people would try to scam search engines by just repeating a word they wanted to rank for over and over and dumping it onto a page, sometimes even making it invisible to the eye by masking it with white font color. The bag of deceitful “SEO” tricks was endless. And it was detrimental to the user experience. It was hurtful to the search experience.
Deception or cutting corners is the exact opposite of how to do SEO well. When I conduct a search, I want to get answers, preferably in one place without having to spend a lot of time hopping from site to site. And I remember the websites that deliver the best content and tend to re-visit them frequently when I’m looking for information.
That’s the kind of trust you want people to have in your brand or website, and it’s the kind of trust that can bolster your SEO performance.
Ok, so let’s say you’ve written a piece of content. The next step is to analyze it to figure out its actual worth from an external perspective.
Here are some things to go over:
1. The first question to consider is whether it’s written well. Are there a lot of basic spelling or grammatical errors? If you want to know how to do SEO right, the foundational piece is strong writing. This is why it’s important to have talented content writers on your team who know how to develop a consistent brand voice and create content that is technically, stylistically sound.
2. Have you provided as much information as someone might need about the topic? Really think about this point. You might think that your 250-word page copy is completely perfect and succinct, but you can probably do better than this. Did you explore all possible aspects of the topic to satisfy the questions of all possible readers, from people completely unfamiliar to the topic all the way to those who are more knowledgeable?
3. Have you connected your readers to other supplementary resources to continue learning or gathering information about the topic? Are you linking to other places, other articles on your own website and authoritative external sites? Just like writing an essay or term paper in school, you need to credit any sources you used to do your research and pull statistics. And if you didn’t use any sources, it’s a good idea to add some. It lends credibility to you and your content when you use authoritative sources to back up your statements and claims.
4. Are you laser focused with your writing, or are you losing track and going off on tangents about unrelated points?
5. Is there compelling imagery or visual elements on the page? Most people enjoy having some graphics to help break up the monotony of reading long paragraphs. In fact, “90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text,” according to two studies.
Adding a video to a page can also improve its performance. Web visitors spend an average of 88% more time on a website that features video.
So those are the basics. If you cover these items and start to incorporate them into your content marketing or website design strategy, you’re probably 80 to 90% of the way to reaching your goals of mastering how to do SEO.
If you want information about how to launch or refine a successful SEO strategy for your brand or website, get in touch with me today!
