Unfortunately, many provide their clients with “cookie-cutter” strategies.

You can’t create the same blogging plan for an enterprise tire company as you would for a pest company that serves a 50-mile radius or an author marketing cookbooks.

First and foremost, the discussion must focus on the end goals of each business or personal brand.

Is the client’s mission to build value over a 10-year period and retain customers (think of a plastic surgeon or investment company), or is the mission to highlight its products to one-time buyers (think of a DNA test business)?

The above examples would require extremely different strategies.

Although all businesses are different, one approach does work for most cases, a strategy that my agency has developed while working with clients from niche wellness product businesses to luxury rehabs to enterprise tire companies.

The process weaves three tactics together that run simultaneously. The first is what I call “Intentional Storytelling SEO,” basically creating keyword-optimized content for user intent that’s based on storytelling. The other tactics focus on Unique Selling Points (USP) and sales blending.

If it sounds complicated, don’t worry – it’s far from it.

Remember, also, as a business grows, its content focus will also grow. And with growth naturally arrives change.

When businesses scale, their products and/or services, along with core values, continuously evolve. This should be reflected in the direction of the blogs.

What also makes this three-step blog strategy approach ideal is that it can be used over and over as a business evolves.

Step 1: ‘Intentional Storytelling SEO’ Tactic

SEO combined with intentional storytelling is the base of any blogging strategy.

Many only focus on the SEO side of things – creating content based on keywords and the searcher’s intent.

The latter simply means creating content around the searcher’s intended outcome.

There are three main types of searcher intent:

• Information (e.g., “What is the history of Blue Widgets”)
• Navigational (e.g., “Blue Widget groups on Facebook”)
• Transactional (e.g., “Blue Widgets for sale”)

For respected digital marketing agencies, designing blog topics around keyword and searcher intent is an absolute given.

But most forget about storytelling. This element is vital for sticking out among the noise – a concept I’ll use frequently here.

When keyword research/searcher intent combines with storytelling, the blog’s power grows.

Here’s a quick rundown that my agency uses.

Keyword research is first. Blogs are the optimal foundation for targeting super long-tail keywords – not the broader keywords typically mapped to main service/product pages.

Regardless of the client, we typically end up with a list of 100 or so long-tail keywords to initially focus on.

We then break those keywords out to main themes based on a searcher’s intent, using the three types of searches as guidelines.

These long-tail keywords typically have lower search volumes, making it much easier for ranking efforts.

Many SEOs I’ve worked with would ignore those keywords under say a search volume of 70 or so – but, depending on how lucrative the outcome would be to get a click on a search query, we sometimes go as low as 10.

Next – we talk to the client and focus on the top ROI services/products for that moment, and whether they are planning any launches of new services/products or promotions.

This information can guide some blog topics.

For example, if a promotion is set for the future you’ll want to start seeding the audience about new launches or promotions. A blog is a perfect platform to do so.

Once you have generated these terms and list of topics about the top ROI services/products, launches and/or promotions, you Google them and analyze.

We also check Reddit, Quora, and the typical social media channels like Facebook and Instagram to see what questions people are asking about subjects related to those terms.

And never forget about the snippet box of questions on Google.

With that information listed on a clean spreadsheet, categories under those four searcher intent categories, we began competitive research by looking at competitor’s rankings for those keywords using tools like SEMrush.

This helps us find other keyword opportunities related to the list of keyword we have already generated and deeper topic opportunities.

Note here – never simply analyze the spots on Google and simply attempt to write a better article.

Even if it’s in your subconscious, you may simply mimic what the others are saying, adding the digital noise.

Only check competitors for keyword and topic opportunities – never mimic their actual content.

When the blog writing begins, turn on the storytelling element. This is why traditional writers trained in SEO are a vital part of my blogging strategies.

For example, the storyline here is how drastically different every agency creates its blog strategy, and how many forget this vital element of, um, storytelling.

Step 2: USP-Focus Tactic

With the above strategy complete, it’s time to focus on what makes your services or products truly stand out among the endless noises within any industry.

The more niche the easier to focus on your unique selling position – what makes you remarkable.

If you’re creating an SEO strategy for a client who only sells Ducati motorcycle parts for a specific model, exposing your USP should arrive simply.

If you’re marketing all Ducati parts, you have a much tougher job.

A USP can’t be simply “100-percent guarantee” or “quickest delivery” or “cheapest prices.”

That’s what everyone will do, and it doesn’t show one spec of uniqueness.

• What if you not only sold the part but had educational resources on how to install those parts via video or from an official technical manual?
• What if you had service technicians on hand to answer questions or affiliates with the client’s closest and most reputable Ducati techs?

That’s something unique.

And that needs to be exploited throughout your blogging efforts.

Though you’re a parts-selling business, you can now blog about the top qualities of a Ducati service rep.

What questions you should ask?

Do they use OEM or aftermarket parts, and which are better?

This strategy will also help you become a strong valuable source for the do-it-yourselfers.

They may not be searching for a part at that moment, but you will be, as author John Hall says “Top of Mind” when the sale opp arrives later on.

And this will also allow you to rank for longer-tail keywords related to your products or services that you wouldn’t have initially focused on if you didn’t first create your USP, and then exploit it through blogging.

This will help your overall rankings and brand authority.

One of my agency’s USPs is helping clients define and refine their USPs, and then creating SEO and content strategies that help exploit those USPs through storytelling.

Step 3: Sales Blending Tactic

With the above two blog strategy tactics in mind, it’s time to think about creating a content calendar.

This is where sales come into play.

Yes, bloggers should be super close to the sales team.

This is a crucial process to understand a business’s true audience.

First, understand that the idea of a “sales funnel” is dead.

Rather, transform your thinking to think of it as a cyclone – the creation of Eric Keiles and Mike Lieberman and exposed in “Smash the Funnel: The Cyclonic Buyer Journey.”

Read that book.

It’ll change your perspective on sales.

For now, know that eight “cyclones” are present in the customer-centric model that revolves around customer service, marketing, and sales:

• Pre-Awareness
• Awareness
• Education
• Consideration
• Evaluation
• Rationalization
• Decision Making
• Ongoing Delivery

The goal is to create content that educates the audience across these various cyclones.

Most of my agency’s blog campaigns follow the following for clients:

• 50% written for newbies: They are just learning about your business, industry products or services. These are the types you want to continually feed valuable information so they remember you when they’re ready to purchase your product, need services or become a patient. These are the types that are researching from scratch.
• 25% for intermediate: They are educated, but seek more granular info. Here’s where you can provide more expert-level information to show your knowledge and open doors for future clients.
• 25% for experts: Extremely knowledgeable. These are the readers who are looking for only expert opinion to scale their knowledge. These types are also always looking for the optimal partner to help scale their businesses.

Here’s a quick example from my agency blog:

• 50% of the blogs are for those just learning about content creation and SEO.
• 25% for those who understand content creation and SEO but are searching for reputable help.
• 25% for the experts, who are typically CMOs or SEO managers that are looking for immediate partners.

The advantage here is obvious – you can add value to anyone within any portion of the sales cyclone.

This tactic doesn’t work for everyone – a doctor peer-to-peer publication for example, where you’d be writing only expert content.

But for a majority of businesses, practices and self-promoting websites (authors, musicians), this sales blend is optimal.

I witnessed a few clients that basically nurtured customers from the very beginning when those respective customers were asking simple questions through reading intermediate through expert before becoming a client.

Concluding Thoughts

Content creation is the focus of every one of our SEO strategies.

And blogging is the main focus of our content marketing efforts for sustained growth of both brand and stronger SEO.

Blogs are the main pillar for a successful digital campaign:

• Stronger SEO due to stronger content and numerous qualified keywords.
• Newsletter content for building loyalty from existing clients on the email list and educating prospects.
• Fuel for social media to provide value to audience/followers.
• Link building purposes by natural shares of strong content and campaigns of personally reaching out to websites for quality links.

The three tactics have worked to create blog strategies for multiple clients.

Remember: the “cookie-cutter” blog strategies are BS.

Every client has a unique audience and unique services or products – two direct competitors require different content strategies regarding their positioning within their market.

There are hundreds of ways to create a blog strategy.

Every strategy should first focus on the target audience, then move to what would work best for that audience.

Does the audience require more education, or is that audience easily influenced by promotions or a brand’s dominance over a market vs everything else?

Regardless of the situation, the above three-blended blog strategy will work.

My agency typically uses the above strategy as a starting point for every client, and after a few months or quarters of testing, we always find extensions to these steps and add a fourth, fifth, or sixth tactic, such as:

• Focusing on a CEO who has a huge brand.
• Capitalizing on it by making him or her the focus of content or author of the content.

Or create a series of super-short Seth-Godin type content for audiences that push them directly to a promotion for a product.

Test. Evaluate. Remain the course or pivot, whether that pivot is huge or small.

Optimizing a blog strategy is a lifelong process that’s cyclical – this is one reason why the successful content marketers work so hard.

And the sustainable ones never forget to tell a story.

source: searchenginejournal

When set up correctly, citations can be really easy to manage and can lead to improved local rankings.

However, if done incorrectly, citations can be a nightmare to clean up.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through every facet of citations to help you improve your local SEO strategy.

What Are Citations?

Citations are an online reference to a business that features the business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP).

Typically, when an SEO refers to citations, they are talking about a group of individual business listings on various sites.

Most citations take the form of an online business directory, but other types of citations exist.

While the minimum amount of information required for most citations is just a name, address, and phone number, most websites offer many more opportunities to add additional information.

Types of Citations

There are several different types of citation websites out there and many SEOs argue about which are more valuable than others.

However, for local SEO, the SEO community generally agrees that the following Citations are “must-haves.”

• Google My Business
• Bing Maps
• Facebook
• Yelp

There are hundreds of potential websites to list a business online, but not all of them may be relevant for your business. That’s why citation categories exist.

There are many types of citations for many different types of businesses. Attorneys, healthcare, real estate, you name it; a category of exists.

While some citations have a higher domain authority than other, the category relevancy is more important than the domain authority. That’s why getting listed in these industry categories is critical.

Link Building vs. Citations

Some SEOs mistakenly group citations management into link building.

While this does involve building links for a website, the intent is much different. Search engines like Google claim to be able to know the difference.

Why Citations Are Important

Improve Local Rankings

Citations are considered a ranking factor for local SEO. Having your business listed in trusted online directories sends signals to Google to improves their degree of certainty that your business exists.

The quantity of listings, the accuracy of your listings, and the quality of the online directories can affect how Google perceives your online presence.

This is why it’s important to pick your citations wisely.

Piggy Back Page One Results

Another underreported benefit of building citations is that some online business directories dominate page one of local search. Sites like Yelp and YellowPages tend to consistently rank high for most local searches.

So if you can’t beat them, join them! These online directories provide other opportunities to earn real estate on page one.

Earn Referral Traffic

Many people are loyal to different citations, such as Yelp for restaurants. Many foodies are trained to go to Yelp when looking for new restaurants before going to Google.

Getting listed in as many potential directories as possible may earn valuable referral traffic.

How to Pick the Right Citations

With all of the citations out there, you may not be able to get your business listed in all of them. Whether it be time or cost restraints, you may find yourself struggling to narrow down your list.

Just because quantity of citations is important, you shouldn’t stress yourself out because you can’t list your business in all of them. Guess what, that’s probably a good thing!

If you’re using a tool, you may have limits to how many directories they sync with.

When deciding which citations to list your business in, a good rule of thumb is to start with the online business directories that are most relevant to your industry.

There are several online lists of top industry citations by business category:

• Moz – Citations by Category
• WhiteSpark – Best Citations by Category

After establishing your list of industry-specific online business directories, you’ll want to get a list of general citations. BrightLocal has a great list of some of the most popular directories.

The best online business directories are ones that potential customers actually use.

For example, many people use directories like HealthGrades to actively search for a doctor. This directory not only establishes relevance for healthcare companies, but also can drive referral traffic.

Tools to Help Manage Citations

There are many different tools out there to help you manage your online business directories. All of them vary in costs, features, and functionality, but most of them use the same citations.

This can make it difficult to decide which tools to use. However, there are several things to consider when looking for the right listings management tool.

What to Look for in Citation Management Tools

Here are some things I always look for when deciding which tool to use.

Citation variety

• Does the tool offer the option to select industry-specific directories?
• Does the tool allow you to select specific directories or does it pick for you?

How does the tool setup the citations?

• Does it have a direct API to the directories?
• Does it use aggregators?

Does it offer duplicate suppression?

• How easy is it to manage suppressing duplicates?
• How accurate is the duplicate detection?

Tracking

• What kind of tracking features does the tool offer?
• How accurate is the tracking?
• Can it sync to other tracking tools?

Price

• Does the price per location fit my budget?
• How does it compare to other tools with the same features?

How to Optimize Citations

Citation management is more than just putting your business out there. To really optimize your online presence, there are a few factors to keep in mind.

NAP Consistency

NAP consistency refers to having consistent name, address, and phone numbers across all listings. There have been several independent studies that have shown that having a consistent NAP listing may be a factor to local SEO.

Descriptions

Business descriptions can help improve local rankings by adding in your top keywords. It can also help search engines better understand your business.

Website Link

Many businesses just link to their home page. However, a better approach is to link directly to the location page. This reduces steps for users to get the information they’re looking for and has the same effect for search engines.

Business Category

Some citations, such as Google My Business, allow you to select secondary categories. This may help you rank for secondary targeted keywords.

Photos

Adding photos of your business may help improve customer conversion rates and may help you rank in image searches, if optimized properly.

My tip for optimizing images is to optimize the image file name and alt text if the directory gives you the option.

Reviews

Having great reviews not only helps you earn new business but can also improve your rankings. Google looks at review sentiment on 3rd party sites to gauge the quality of businesses.

How to Track & Measure the Value of Citations

Listings management is an investment. Your stakeholders will want to know if that investment is paying off.

Many tools offer different ways to track citation statuses and performance. However, there are a few steps you can take to help cover your butt when it comes time to report the fruits of your labor.

How to Track Citation Statuses

Some tools have open APIs with directories that help keep citations live. However, some tools simply establish listings and leave it at that.

Sometimes businesses can lose citations for a variety of reasons, so it’s important to track the status of your citations.

If your tool of choice doesn’t offer any way to keep track of your citations, then I recommend using other 3rd party tools to keep track of their statuses.

Author’s Note: I’m not endorsed by any of the tools below. Just a fan and use them daily.

Little Warden

This is a paid tool, but really affordable. You can use this tool to monitor the response codes (and much more) of multiple URLs. Setting this can quickly notify you via email if any of your citations disappear.

Screaming Frog

There is a free version, but I recommend the paid version of this tool, which is also very affordable. You can create scheduled crawls of URLs to check their response codes.

How to Track Citation Performance

While many tools can track varying degrees of performance, none of them can track how they perform on your website.

While you can certainly track individual site performance via the acquisition report, you can’t track global effort performance without creating a custom report.

A far simpler option would be to add UTM tracking to URLs and add the same Campaign or Source name to your URLs.

Example:

https://www.mywebsite.com/location/cityname?utm_source=citation&utm_medium=referral

Using this method, you can simply search in Google Analytics for “citation” under the Source/Medium report.

source: searchenginejournal

It’s a debatable topic amongst many, however, this is defiantly true:

Website security, or the absence of it, can directly and critically impact a site, and that includes the site’s organic performance.

For this reason, website security should not be ignored when it comes to digital marketing plans.

But first, let’s gain a deeper understanding of what hacking, it itself, is, in order to connect the dots on why it should not be neglected.

What Is Hacking?

Hacking occurs when an individual gains access to a specific website or computer network, sans permission.

Unwarranted hacking most often occurs when people are trying to gain access to sensitive or private information, or to redirect users to a specific hacker’s website.

What Are Some Common Tools Utilized by Hackers?

Malware

Malware is specifically designed to damage or disable a specific network, with the goal usually being a data breach.

The potential after-effects of a malware attack can be great, including extensive financial losses for an organization.

Spamming

Website spamming usually occurs when a hacker adds hypertext to a webpage that, when clicked on by a user, will link to the hacker’s chosen destination.

Adding spammy links to a hacker’s website on websites that have a high amount of traffic to them has a chance of increasing search engine rankings.

It is essentially a way to shortcut the system of solidified, ethical SEO work.

Effects of Hacking

The ramifications of hacking can be significant and far-reaching. There are a few more common things that can happen when a website is hacked.

SEO Spam

GoDadddy conducted a study a few years ago where they concluded that over 73% of hacked websites were hacked due to SEO spam reasons.

Something like this could be planned and deliberate, or an attempt to scrape a website that is authoritative and capitalize on strong rankings and visibility.

In most cases, legitimate sites are ultimately turned into link farms and visitors are tricked with phishing or malware links.

Hackers may also employ that use of SQL injections, where a site will be turned over with spam and recovery may be very difficult.

Malicious Code

This can potentially put your website in the sandbox if Google detects it.

If detected, Google will display a warning message when users try to navigate to the site, and therefore encouraging them to stay away.

It can also potentially result in the complete removal of a site from search engines in an effort to safeguard users.

This will both, directly and indirectly, influence SEO value:

• Visits: Overall organic site traffic will most likely drop significantly.
• Engagement metrics: Metrics such as time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate will most likely be negatively affected, which will send negative signals to Google in terms of user experience factors.
• Mistrust: Users who know that your site may be less enticed to visit again if they know that your site has had one or multiple security issues, thus also affecting your traffic, and ultimately, your bottom line.

Unplanned Redirects
Oftentimes, hackers will implement redirects when a website is hacked.

These will send users to a different website than the one that they navigated to initially.

When users are directed to this separate web address, they will usually find that the site contains:

Malicious forms of content such as duplicate content that isn’t true.
Other types of scams like phishing where users are enticed to click on a spammy link and ultimately reveal sensitive information.
If Google follows your site that has been redirected and sees that it contains questionable content, it may severely hurt overall organic visibility in search.

Backlinks

Search engines carefully assess the overall reputation and value of domains and links that link to one another.

During a hack, links will oftentimes be added to a site, and most likely ones with low value, which can negatively affect SEO efforts.

Your website may ultimately be flooded with backlinks from questionable sources, which will most likely decrease the level of trust Google or other search engines has in a site.

Blacklisting

Being hacked can put a site at a serious detriment in Google’s eyes. This can affect a site’s presence in SERPs and also result in potentially several manual actions in Search Console if Google flags it.

The kicker is, is that oftentimes they do not. This usually only leads to more attacks, such as via malware, without the webmaster knowing, and puts the site at risk for an even greater loss, both from a visibility and revenue standpoint.

This creates a bit of a conundrum. Being flagged or blacklisted for malware essentially depletes your site’s visibility across the board, at least until the site is analyzed and cleaned and penalties removed.

Yet, not getting flagged when your site contains malware can result in greater risk and penalization.

Common Risks & How to Prevent Attacks

There are a few more common things that put your site at a greater risk of getting hacked:

Installing Plugins or Other Tools From Untrusted Sources or Not Updating Them
Many plugins, such as those used in a CMS such as WordPress, are not all secure.

Hackers are consistently searching for sites that use insecure or outdated plugins and then finding ways to exploit the site.

As a best practice, it is recommended to research a plugin and read reviews before installing it on your site.

Sharing a Server May Also Pose a Risk in Terms of Site Security

This is because someone could easily upload a spammy or malicious file, or even grant access to other hackers.

Non-Secure Credentials May Also Pose a Risk for Data Security

It is recommended that secure passwords are created for online accounts and make them difficult to guess.

Another more advanced method to prevent an attack is through penetration testing. This analyzes and tests your network’s security and any potential vulnerabilities within it.

Conclusion

Everyone is affected by web security. When building a partnership with a website or client, SEOs should be able to provide some advice when it terms to overall security.

If you’re responsible for the SEO effectiveness of a site, part of your role is to ensure that there are security measures in place to protect it.

source: searchenginejournal

1. Pick the right colors.

When choosing colors for your website, you shouldn’t simply pick your favorite. Instead, you need to consider the emotions each color will convey and if that emotion matches your brand. It’s commonly believed that certain colors affect the way we feel about a business, including whether we decide to make a purchase.

The color blue, for example, is thought to evoke feelings of trust, strength and dependability, which is why companies like Dell, Ford and American Express use it. On the other hand, companies like Lego, Nintendo and YouTube chose red because it tends to evoke excitement and youthfulness.

So consider what your website’s colors are conveying to your audience. Do you sell healthy lifestyle products? Then think about choosing green to evoke peacefulness and growth. And also bear in mind that using high-contrasting colors helps the most important elements, like call-to-action buttons, stand out.

2. Consider typography.

Just like colors stir specific emotions in people, so do fonts, so you need to choose typography for your website that represents your brand accurately. For instance, if your business makes hand-crafted furniture, you might consider choosing a font that tells your audience that reliability and comfort are important to you.

Additionally, creating enough spacing between lines of text will make your content easier for users to read. The magic line-height (the space above and below lines of text) is 150 percent of the font size you’re using.

3. Use negative space.

Negative space (or whitespace) refers to the space between all of the different elements of your website, such as that between header and content. Lots of negative space on your website is actually a good thing, allowing you to focus on the most important elements — like an eye-catching main image and call-to-action — and overall readability.

4. Choose an F-Pattern.

The F-Pattern refers to the way our eyes move when we read content online. People typically scan from left to right at the top of the screen, then their move eyes scan further down the page, scanning towards the right again, but less so than they did at the top of the screen. So, the area of the page that gets the least visibility is the bottom-right. This eye movement ultimately resembles an “F” or “E” shape. When implementing your F-Pattern, put your most important elements and calls-to-action in the areas that will get seen the most. For instance, if you put your call-to-action at the top left of your website page, it will stand out to your visitors and get more clicks.

When designing your company’s website, you can’t only think about what your business wants or needs. Rather, you need to think about what’s best for your visitors. Use these simple design tips to improve the way users consume the information they need most, and an increase in conversions is sure to follow.

source: entrepreneur.com

While I won’t be discussing that exact topic today, the claim still has some relevance here.

Suppose you’ve done your market research, scoped out the high-traffic pages you’re looking to optimize, and written your killer, keyword-infused content.

Then you slap it on your site and sit back and wait.

Months go by, and those pages still aren’t ranking well.

In fact, there’s almost no change in positions at all, and sales are flat.

How many of you have been in this exact position?

You’ve done everything you knew you had to do, but for some reason, it just didn’t work.

Obviously, this will be a frustrating situation for you. But all is not necessarily lost, and that content you slaved over need not have been crafted in vain.

In this post, we’re going to review some probable reasons why search engines just aren’t picking up your content.

1. What Are You Writing About?

Search engine algorithms consider hundreds of ranking factors when “choosing” where to position your webpage.

These range from your link profile to your page speed.

But before addressing anything else, I’m recommending you look at the subjects of your content pieces, plain and simple.

• What are you writing about?
• Does it answer user questions that you’ve researched (e.g., in SEMrush’s topic research tool or deduced from Google Analytics data)?
• Will it be useful to a wide audience?

These are questions surrounding content relevance.

Your content needs to have several qualities for search engines to consider it relevant. It needs to be original, authoritative, and directly related to the webpage where it will be posted.

Search engines know that users have no interest in reading duplicated, plagiarized, or irrelevant content. As such, you’d have to dive deep into Google’s SERPs to find such content.

That isn’t where you want to be.

Do your research beforehand so you can write brilliant content that you yourself would want to read if you searched for a topic online.

Don’t be afraid to go long, either. The more you do to make your content appear smart, original, and reliable, the better off you will be.

This will all go a long way toward getting your pages to climbs those SERPs.

2. What Keywords Are You Using?

The issue of keywords in your content opens up a kind of web of subtopics.

You already know keywords have their place within all written SEO content, but where do you go from there?

Well, perhaps you need to audit the type of keyword research you’re doing.

You have to be attacking keywords with high search volumes, but, as you may have noticed, it can be quite challenging to try to rank for keywords such as “garden tools store” or “san antonio lawyers.”

Instead, I’d like to call your attention to the long-tail keyword.

Do you think your webpages will attract more potential buyers with “winter coats” or “men’s wool winter pea coats”?

The latter is a long-tail keyword that is more likely to convert for your business because it is highly specific and most likely represents a later stage of a customer buying cycle.

People using that search term are more likely to be ready to make a purchase.

Do your research on the right long-tail keywords for your business. You can do this just by seeing what search engines populate in their predictive text when you search one or two words.

Check out these keyword phrases in tools (e.g., SEMrush or Google’s Keyword Planner) to see how they are performing in the industry. Then leverage them to draw those users in with relevant content optimized for those keywords.

Further, just as content can get old and become in dire need of a refresh, so, too, can keywords. Never think of anything in SEO as being evergreen.

A top-performing keyword that got things done for you last year or even last month can do some funky things in the interim.

Stay on top of your keyword research so you can always keep your content freshly optimized and relevant.

3. Update, Update, Update

By now, you might be noticing a common theme in all these points: relevance rules your rankings.

We’ve talked about how relevant content, with fresh keywords, will go a long way toward ensuring users actually find your website.

And in the same way that content or keywords that were relevant some months ago can fall quickly out of favor with search engines, your website itself can also begin declining in rankings if you don’t regularly update your content.

While the age of your domain may also hold some weight in determining organic ranking, it doesn’t matter much if your content is stale.

Search engines care that you’re keeping up with everyone else in terms of producing relevant, authoritative, optimized content.

If you haven’t given your web content a significant audit in more than a few months, it’s time to commit yourself to doing exactly that.

Take a look at the keywords your content is using and update where needed.

Again, you can use SEMrush’s topic research tool to see how users’ search questions and other interests may have changed since you last checked in.

Just search your keywords yourself and investigate some of your competition.

• How many of them weren’t there when you created your website and did your initial keyword research?
• How might the presence of a strong new competitor affect your rankings, especially if your industry is focused on a niche product or service?

I pose these questions to help you think about how to update your on-site content on a regular basis.

If your website doesn’t already have one, it’s also a great idea to start a company blog and publish to it on a schedule.

As you can imagine, more or less keeping to that schedule’s deadlines by publishing new blog posts will tell search engines that your pages are up to date and relevant. After that, well, you know the rest.

4. Your Link Profile Is Weak

This point I truly cannot stress enough. Inbound links still matter. A lot.

In fact, don’t assume that great content will rank without an effortful link building strategy.

Try to think about your webpages from Google’s perspective.

If Google sees your content is strong, your keywords are fresh, you update regularly, but your site has no inbound links, why is it going to rank you highly?

For all Google knows, you’re up to something that’s keeping other sites from wanting to link to you. Google, consequently, wants to keep you out of its top rankings.

If it’s easier, simply think about links from a user’s perspective.

Finding your site via a link from a blog tells users that the blog trusts your site, that your site is relevant enough to be linked to from a third party with its own reputation to protect.

Our hypothetical users then click on that link and discover your site, with its fresh, relevant, optimized content ready to answer their questions and even direct them to other useful sites with its own links.

Links keep users flowing from site to site, but, more importantly, they make your own site look reliable.

I’ve written previously on Search Engine Journal about competitive link analysis, one of the most reliable ways to build links back to your website.

Competitive link analysis starts with evaluating who is linking to your competition.

Examine why the referring domains may have agreed to link to those competitors.

• What kinds of domains are they?
• What unites them?
• Who are their audiences?
• How do your competitors’ link profiles differ from yours?
• Furthermore, what are your competitors doing that you aren’t doing to earn those links?

When you discover the answers to these questions, you’ll know what you have to do, and who you have to target to build your own links.

Your job then becomes endeavoring for those referring domains to link to your website, either through an optimized piece of extant content or through new content that you craft specifically for this purpose.

You can also present pages on your site as ideal replacements for dead or broken links on those referring domains.

No, this isn’t easy, but think of the authority that comes with a robust backlink profile.

If all else fails, build those links!

To Sum Up

Now, in the midst of thinking about all that I’ve presented to you, don’t forget that a number of technical SEO issues may also be affecting your rankings.

Mobile speed, page-load time, and problems with your XML sitemap can all drive users away from your site.

However, assuming none of these things are giving you trouble, read through my four points again.

And remember: when your content, keywords, webpages, and backlink profile are up to date and addressing user concerns, your SEO will be miles ahead of your competitors who aren’t as aware as you are.

source: searchenginejournal