Taking your website live is only half job done. You have to ensure that it shows up in search engine results when your potential customers type in the related phrases called keywords. Without improving the searchability of your website, you can’t realistically expect to bring organic traffic to your website.
That’s exactly why you need an effective SEO campaign to ensure your customers and target audience are able to find you on the internet. In this post, we are going to discuss some key guidelines on what you should and shouldn’t do while executing your SEO strategy.
Do’s of Your SEO Campaigns
1. Pay Attention to Content
At this point, the quote “content is king” has become a cliché but it’s a cliché that expresses the truth. Coming up with engaging and SEO friendly content is crucial to bringing traffic to your website. Once a visitor is on your website, content is also what converts a visitor into a customer.
If you want to outperform the websites which are already ranking on the first page of Google for your targeted keyword, the first crucial step is to build better content than those websites. Your content planning should include developing engaging, impactful, and SEO optimized content which doesn’t read like a run of the mill copy outsourced to an amateur freelancer.
2. Focus on Quality Backlinks
Another SEO strategy that works well is backlink generation where we put a link to our site on other websites through the placement of relevant content.
However, it should be noted that it is more important to focus on high-quality backlinks than the quantity. What it means is that you should try to place your backlinks on websites that rank well in search engine results. It’s better to have one backlink on BBC website than having 100 backlinks placed on no-name webpages.
Few of the best websites to check the backlinks on your (or your competitors) websites are Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush etc.
Also read: 6 Pro Tips to Build Backlinks to Your Blog.
3. Enhance Organic Traffic
The main goal of any SEO campaign should be the boost organic traffic. It means that while it’s fine to spend money on PPC ad campaigns and running social media sponsored ads, with good SEO people should be able to land on your website without having to click on an ad.
How do you get there? By detailed planning and incorporation of actionable items with specific and measurable goals.
Remember, organic SEO is a long-term game and that’s why it is of utmost significance to keep tabs on how your website is performing on different keywords. As long as there is a visible improvement, keep working on your plan but as soon as the improvement stops; it’s time to reevaluate and rethink your strategy.
4. Performance Assessment
Since SEO is a long-term and continuous endeavor, it is crucial to keep assessing the performance and effectiveness of your plans periodically. Without studying key indicators regularly, you won’t know whether what you are doing and investing in is even effective or not. It would also give you insight into whether a certain initiative is beneficial enough to justify the human effort and financial cost.
Without performance analysis from time to time, SEO campaign is basically shooting in the dark with the hope that everything you are doing sticks.
Quick Tip: You can use the FREE Google search console tools to track your search analytics like Clicks, Impressions, Click through rate (CTR), Positions etc.
Don’ts of Your SEO Campaigns
1. Avoid Keyword Stuffing
There was a time when the number of keywords in your content mattered. That time has long gone.
Yes, it is important to include relevant keywords in your web copy and off-site SEO content but keep the frequency under the natural limit. If the same word or phrase occurs, again and again, it doesn’t only put off the customer because of poor readability but Google also discourages the website ranking with repetition and stuffing.
2. Steer clear of Plagiarized Content
One of the cardinal sins of SEO is using a large portion of texts that have already been indexed by search engines. This is something that heavily penalizes your website and instead of doing any good, makes things worse for your website ranking. If there is information that you want on your website, make sure it’s at least rewritten and reformatted so it doesn’t appear the same.
The ideal here is to have your original content. That’s what search engines value the most and if you keep adding original and engaging content to your website, you will soon witness substantial gains in terms of how your website performs in search engine ranking.
Also read: How to start your blog within 20 min? The Ultimate Guide.
3. Disavow Legacy SEO Practices
If you have been carrying out SEO for your website for quite a while then you must have used some grey or even black hat practices to get ahead. To be honest, why not when something is effective and everyone else is doing it anyway?
However, in current scenario where search engines have become incredibly smarter and the algorithms working on the back end are able to figure out shady practices; it’s not only a bad idea to employ grey or black hat SEO methods but it becomes imperative for you to retract and disavow from anything that you may have done in the past.
Disconnect your website from bad quality backlinks and redo content to maintain natural tone and style wherever you can. This will ensure that you are not penalized for the practices you have done in the past.
4. Don’t Hire Amateurs
SEO is a science that requires an intricate understanding of how search engines work, evolve and rank different websites. An experienced SEO professional knows it’s not just guesswork but the art of drawing insight looking at a wide range of statistics, facts, and figures.
Spending your money on someone inexperienced just to save a few bucks would cost you more in the long run than hiring an experienced expert right now. Not to mention you also lose the most valuable resource which is priceless in the context of SEO i.e. time.
Final Thoughts
SEO is the lifeblood of your website that keeps the traffic coming. It is imperative to invest your human and financial resources in an effective, monitored, and well-thought SEO campaign that has been devised giving consideration to the latest developments, news, and search engine trends.
Every SEO strategy isn’t going to be successful, but as long as most of what you are doing works; you are golden! Just remember to pay heed to aforementioned pointers that will improve your odds of coming up with an effective and