As we head off into a new year, it’s the perfect opportunity to review your SEO strategy for 2020 and beyond. You may already have targets in mind for your site as part of a broader digital marketing campaign, such as increasing organic traffic or improving conversion rates.
But the world of SEO is complex and can often feel overwhelming to keep up with. A seemingly endless amount of algorithm updates can leave you confused or frozen into inaction. So how do you know if you have the right SEO strategy? What are the strategies that move the needle today?
As well as SEO strategies, there are numerous tools to measure a website’s SEO performance; so many, in fact, that it can be a big undertaking in itself to decide which tools to trust, and use as part of your campaign. The reality is that the same time-tested techniques that have been important for years are still equally important today. So, here’s a quick refresher of a few SEO basics as you think about SEO for 2020.
SEO vs PPC
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of organic or ‘free’ traffic to your website via search engine results. These organic search results are based on unpaid, natural rankings determined by search engine algorithms, and can be directly impacted by various SEO.
Paid search, on the other hand, is exactly that: users can pay to have their website appear on search engine result pages when certain keywords or phrases are typed in and searched. Together, SEO and paid search strategies are often referred to as Search Engine Marketing.
Combined together they are often seen as the perfect one-two punch of quick wins and long term search visibility.
Looking Further in Depth at SEO Basics
So what are the SEO strategies that you need to be focusing on this year? Let’s take a look at three cornerstone concepts that are important to any SEO strategy: 1) Content 2) Authority 3) User Signals
Is Content Still King?
You bet it is! Yes content is still king and continues to be one of Google’s top ranking factors. Creating in-depth informative content that is of interest to your target audience is the most important thing you can do on your site. Google wants users to come back time and time again. The only way they can guarantee that is to deliver the best set of search results that answer a users query.
Keywords
So, how do you write SEO focused content to grow your website? It begins by choosing the right keywords. Keywords or keyphrases are simply the terms you incorporate into your content to improve search engine rankings. Choosing the right keywords is as much art as it is science, but there are tools in the market that help with this selection process. These tools provide insights into a keywords’ search volume and also a measurement of how difficult (Keyword Difficulty) it will be to rank for that specific keyword. Therefore, the art comes into play in identifying relevant keywords that:
- Have good search volume, and
- Your website actually has a chance to rank for
Keyword Difficulty (KW) is a metric that indicates how hard it is for an “average” website to rank for a given keyword. The higher the KW difficulty score, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword. There are many considerations that determine your site’s ability to rank for a targeted keyword. Google indexes your website and places authority and value on your site based on things like it’s content, history, technical structure, and inbound links. Therefore brand new sites will often find it difficult to rank on page one for keywords that have a seemingly low KW difficulty. While authoritative sites with rich content can rank more easily for keywords with even a high difficulty score.
As you research keywords, other words and phrases will pop up that may be less popular, but are still related to your original keyword search. Using your specific and researched keywords is vital to growth, but implementing lesser used keywords may boost your site more quickly, given that the lesser used keywords have a lower KW difficulty. A “head term” keyword is a popular and competitive term that drives high volume. The words “coffee shop” is an example of a “head term”.
The opposite is a “long tail” keyword made up of a longer and lesser used phrase or group of words that generate less volume and fewer searches. If “coffee shop” is a head term, the phrase “best coffee shops in Greenville, SC” would be an example of a long tail keyword.
Determining which combination of keywords to use is an important part of an SEO initiative. Head terms are highly competitive. Long tail keywords are supplemental to the head term keywords and are generally easier to rank for. Again, this is where the art comes in…selecting the right combination of keyword targets will directly impact your ranking success.
It’s important to identify both types of keywords for your website and use them. If you’re still thinking about the head term, “coffee shop”, maybe add in long tail keywords like “delicious coffee in Greenville, SC”, “locally owned coffee shop in Greenville, SC” and more. To this end, you’ll want to think like a consumer in Greenville, looking for a cup of coffee. How would you search for coffee? Be specific!
Readability and Content Structure
Finally, in addition to your keyword strategy, make sure your content is well written and readable. Ensure that the paragraphs flow together to create a cohesive whole that will draw the reader in and keep them engaged. While it’s important to write naturally for visitors to the site and not just for search engines, there are specific writing concepts that you should always be mindful of. I will not list them all here, but here are a few important ones:
- Use your primary keyword in your page Title tag and in the page Header (H1)
- Add your primary keyword to the Meta description
- Incorporate your primary keyword in a friendly url if possible
- Use your primary keyword in the first paragraph of the page
- Reuse the primary keyword 2-3 times every 500 words
- Incorporate secondary keywords throughout the content
An Authoritative Site
Backlinks
Google also places tremendous ranking value on the popularity of your website…as in, how many other websites link to your site? Think of it kinda like a popularity contest. The more other sites link to your site, then the more important your site must be right? A backlink (also called an inbound link or incoming link) is a link created when one website links to another. These backlinks count as ‘confidence votes’ in the eyes of search engines, and when it comes to links, both quality and quantity count towards your ranking performance.
Google uses this backlink information to determine your websites’ authority. Google no longer publishes their calculated authority metric, so other SEO companies have created their own algorithms to try and estimate this authority. In this context, authority is simply a measurement of backlink popularity and the likelihood of ranking. The higher the authority, the more likely a site or page will rank for its targets.
Building authority and trust in the eyes of Google and other search engines is a long road – you have to earn it. This is done by creating high quality content that grabs the attention (and the links) from 3rd party sites. There are a variety of ways to recruit links to your site, such as guest blogging and marketing to industry influencers. If done correctly, it can be a fairly time consuming process, yet it will have a huge impact on your ranking performance.
Monitoring Authority
Most backlinks that are relevant to your website will help improve your organic visibility over time, even if the site linking to you is low authority itself. For instance, a small, local blog links to your coffee shop website. But as your own website moves up and you enter more competitive SERPs, (or Search Engine Results Pages) you’ll need to rely on gaining links from other high-authority sites from within your niche. This would be like having the Greenville, SC visitor’s page link directly to your coffee website and declare that your coffee is the best they’ve ever had. Having high-authority + niche-relevant links pointing to your site is the gold standard in improving your SEO.
There are several website services that let you monitor your site’s authority. Some people use Moz’s Domain authority metric, probably the most widely recognized in the industry, while others decide to use Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, thought to be more accurate by some. But bear in mind these metrics are just a proxy. If your authority metric isn’t increasing as quickly as you’d like, yet your organic traffic is growing, then I wouldn’t get too distracted by chasing a higher authority. You are already achieving what you want in the form of higher organic growth; in time, your authority will improve.
User Signals
With your keyword-researched and well-structured content up and running, search engines begin to collect data on your site in the form of user signals. These user signals provide information to Google that is generally believed to impact your SEO performance. It monitors things like:
- Click through rate (CTR)– how often people click on your search result
- Bounce rate– how often a user leaves a landing page (bounces) without visiting another page on your site. (This isn’t necessarily bad, depending on if the user did or didn’t find what they were looking for; dwell time tends to indicate the answer to that question.)
- Dwell time– how long did the user spend on the landing page?
The last point above is maybe the most important, as it indicates to Google whether or not your content was helpful in addressing the user’s search. When a visitor clicks on your site, and then does not immediately return to the search engine, that signals to Google that the landing page matches the search query of the visitor.
So what is the key to increasing dwell time? We’ve already touched on the main topic, which is high quality, compelling and well-written content. But as you consider your visitors and SEO, also picture how your website looks to a user on their mobile. With mobile web traffic only continuing to increase, if your site is not responsive and quick to load it will negatively impact your SEO. Visually, keep your website clean and simple. Your coffee shop may be the best in Greenville, but if it’s impossible to read the menu on a mobile, you’ll lose a lot of potential customers who stumbled on your website searching for coffee.
A final comment on tracking user signals is to monitor your Google Analytics account. There is a wealth of information in this account that will help you identify trends, opportunities and weaknesses in your site.
Conclusion
All of this may seem a little overwhelming, and that’s because ‘SEO’ is a very broad subject. But ultimately thinking about SEO tactics for this year should really be no different than in years past. Write keyword-targeted content that users will love, promote that content to your audience, and monitor your user signals to optimize the visitor’s experience. If you do that consistently and authentically, you’ll definitely begin to see your search rankings improve and your organic traffic grow, which should ultimately help your business.