SEO can sometimes seem like a marketing unicorn. A term almost everyone has heard, yet far too few know how best to distill its power and authority when it comes to boosting your marketing and sales goals. But with the right approach, search engine optimization doesn’t have to be a scary mythical goal — instead, it can be an achievable objective when planning and executing appropriately.
Every company, business, and marketer wants to optimize their search engine results, but if you’re not forecasting or experimenting, then you can’t expect much in the game of optimization. Here, we’ll detail the steps you can take to boost your SEO marketing strategies like a seasoned pro.
Content Quality > Content Quantity
In the early days of SEO, experts would tout quantity over quality. In today’s world of mass information on the internet, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Google and other search engines want your content to be helpful to the user. It’s not about the number of words on the page, but the quality of content you provide your users. If it’s helpful, more people will be attracted to the content, and in turn, Google will reward you in your rankings.
Why You Need to Forecast And Experiment
Forecasting (or planning) and researching are really important when writing content for SEO. Often, business owners and brand leaders want to communicate the effectiveness of their products and services and position themselves as leaders in their respective industries — and this is perfectly fine when coupled with SEO marketing strategies.
But writing content that’s brand-aligned without doing the proper forecasting may run the risk of being a big fat waste of time. Something that nobody wants. Forecasting allows you to view what competitors in the industry are doing content-wise, analyze what is working for them, and prepare strategies that align with industry trends.
And like all organic content, SEO takes experimenting. One blog article or landing page isn’t going to boost your entire website into Google’s top 10. So experimenting with what works and doesn’t work is important, and the best way to experiment is to detail your content’s outcomes along a set period of time. Whether that’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly reporting (or all), is up to you. But in order to experiment and forecast, you must find your KPIs and set up consistent metric reporting mechanisms.
Challenges You May Face
- It takes time. SEO research, analysis, and writing take time. Many times, business leaders work with SEO and marketing experts to execute their SEO marketing strategies. This could be the more efficient approach if you’re looking for results a little bit faster.
- Search engines are in charge. At the end of the day, it’s Google’s job to determine what content is valuable and should be served up in its results pages. In some ways, SEO marketers are at the mercy of search engines, and this can be challenging.
- It takes different skills. Analysis and writing are two very different talents. Sometimes there is that one marketer who can do it all, but often working with an SEO agency can provide the distinct and unique skills you need for optimal SEO management.
Tips To Do SEO Like a Seasoned Pro
Learning how to improve your SEO strategy doesn’t have to be a long and arduous task for your business. Instead, you can be doing SEO like a seasoned pro in no time. Follow these six steps in order to build a better strategy moving forward.
Document Meticulously
Keeping meticulous documentation of your SEO marketing strategies is crucial in measuring your successes and areas for opportunity as you increase SEO. Keeping a detailed living document of your metrics can help you both with consistency and with finding holes in your overall strategy.
Start your SEO metric reporting immediately, even if it’s a slow burn. This will eventually allow you to compare your metrics over time to see how you’re progressing with your SEO marketing strategies. Also keep documentation of Google’s algorithms, how they evolve, and what Google suggests for SEO marketers currently.
Establish Baselines
Baseline metrics are the start of your reporting. It’s what you’re comparing to over time. Baseline metrics help you determine what is working and what isn’t and give you the opportunity to make adjustments accordingly. Baseline data is the foundational data for all your SEO metrics moving forward.
Baseline data can look like:
- Average website traffic over a set period of time
- Average goal/event completion (button clicks, form submissions, etc) over a set period of time
- KPIs: revenue, conversions, leads, etc over a previous set period of time
- Search engine ranking over a previous set period of time
Qualitative Tests And Feedback
Qualitative tests are a little art and science mixed together. These are the data sets that aren’t as easily defined as the baseline metrics to compare them to. Instead, qualitative feedback can help you establish the voice that’s being communicated in your content, it can help you understand if you’re aligned with your brand values, and it can help you understand how users react qualitatively to your data.
Ways in which you can gather qualitative data and feedback could be through:
- Surveys
- In-person or recorded interviews
- Recorded readings of your content
- Small focus groups
Getting this sort of qualitative feedback can help you determine the nuances that exist in your content, outside of the analytical numbers and metrics that typical SEO marketers target. This type of feedback, although time-consuming, can really set you apart from other SEO marketing strategies.
Use Trends Data
How is your current industry’s content performing across the internet? Trends data can both help you in forecasting your content topics and their performance. Some ways to understand current trends in your industry could be to:
- Identify current keywords competitors are using to rank
- What are common search queries that users are searching for?
- What is the word count for the specific industry?
- What are the main acquisition statistics for your industry? Is it search, social, referral, email, or paid?
Conduct Split Tests
What content provides better results for you? Split tests allow you to measure which content performs better, making it easier to refine and move forward based on the data. Split testing can be done with anything from the type of CTA you’re using or the header of an online ad. But the important part of testing is again, measuring the results so you can make informed decisions moving forward.
Calculate Estimated Traffic Increases
You can calculate forecasts and estimate your traffic increases based on your new content’s keywords. This can be done by taking the Search Volume and multiplying it by the Forecasted Rank’s CTR then subtract the Current Rank’s CTR.
The end result will be the curve of performance and CTR for your site and the projected increase you can make by adding these SEO marketing strategies.
A Case Study in Successful SEO Strategy
When implementing a successful SEO campaign, results can be quite promising. For Yokel Local client, Coastal Recycling in Jacksonville, FL, we implemented a robust organic search campaign to increase SEO performance and overall traffic to the site.
As you can see, based on a 30 day period, the average sessions year over year have increased significantly, leaving way for organic search content to be the main driver to their website. Some strategies that were implemented in order to see this increase are:
- Consistent quality blogs that attract users to their content.
- Blog posts with keywords that their audience is searching for.
- Optimization of Google My Business and reporting its metrics.
- A backlinking strategy that allows users on authority sites to drive more traffic to them.
Since its launch, the website has seen tremendous organic growth directly tied to the blog and backlinking strategy set in place.
A Few of Our Favorite SEO Tools
If you’re in need of some support for your SEO marketing strategy, Yokel Local is here to help.
Our SEO services will help your website (and business) get found in the organic search results on Google and other major search engines. But if you’re wanting to explore more options, here are some of our favorite tools for effective SEO.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a great tool for SEO newbies and experts, alike. It can help you rank on Google’s search engines, perform site audits, explore the current content on your site, and track the ranking of your site. It’s a great educational tool for novice SEO marketers.
Majestic
Majestic is a great tool to use for backlink tracking. It’ll help you learn which websites and businesses are currently linking to your site. This can be beneficial because it can help you see if the sites leading users to your site have domain authority — or if they’re worsening your ranking on Google.
SurferSEO
SurferSEO can help you generate content and optimize, quickly. All content generated by this tool is data-driven and can help you sort through content that will be brand-aligned and competitive in your given industry.
Mangools
Mangools can help you with a suite of services for SEO marketing strategies. You can find the right keywords for your content, you can find powerful backlinks to help boost your rankings on search engines, and more!
Hire an SEO Company Like Yokel Local And Get The Right Website Traffic
Forecasting, experimenting, and optimizing your content for SEO takes creativity, dedication, and a team of skilled marketers who understand the robust needs of SEO and content marketing. If you follow the steps mapped out in this article, you’ll be on your way to becoming a seasoned pro in no time.
But, becoming a seasoned pro for SEO strategies doesn’t have to happen overnight. If you’re looking to increase your search engine rankings and organic content as soon as possible, work with us to create a strategy that works for you and your business!
