Tactics to Boost Your SEO Strategy
Yada yada about this, yada yada about that and queue …It’s about getting people to read (or listen or pay attention to your message) AND THEN convert. Copywriters understand how to convert readers into customers, right? Purchasers. Even if you don’t have a degree in marketing, you can use these techniques to boost your SEO strategy and rank higher…in Google of course. Yes, Bing Matters…matters very much (Alexa much?), but these ideas are Google tested. Like daily Google tested, and not just by me (here is some of my SEO strategy at works).
1. Invest in high quality media.
Whether you’re using pictures, graphics or videos, you need to make the most of your marketing. Hire a photographer, use stock photos that you pay for, or even use free ones. Social media feeds are busy places so use imagery and carousels when possible! If you don’t capture the reader’s attention right away, you’ll get passed by. Spend money! Make ads stand out by investing in professional images to go along with your natural posts. Social media is a ying/yang, you need unboosted content mixed in with boosted content — heavy interaction with your active social profiles is a google signal! Stuff it under multiple headers if you will here’s an article from Backlinko on those ranking factors. So spending money on ads is a ranking factor? No, but that traffic, likes, shares, and activity is! Am I talking Google Adwords? Sure, but mostly social media ads that are right in the middle of the social experience. Even Google Adwords can help you get your brand out there, improve direct searches, organic searches, and your organic position — happy people on your website, coming back to your website, ordering from your website are all good things for SEO — no matter how they initially found you!
2. Write good headlines.
Avoid clickbait and salesy headlines. But be smart, get some advice from a program on what people are actually searching for i.e. AHREFS, but there are others: SEMrush, SEOMoz, SEO Spyglass, Majestic, Raven. By god you need tools to do this stuff right, so pick a good one (don’t know which?)Write your headline to make the customer realize how you can solve his or her problem. Right? The old Problem, Strategy, Solution model. But hey, subheadlines matter too, you know h2, h3, h4…don’t know how to pick? Answer The Public, love how this tool scrapes Google Suggest…I mean save me hours of time looking up related queries to my topic. Hello? This guys is mean, but he is GREAT at what he does.
As the author, your goal might be to sell/inform about products/services, but the customer’s goal is to meet his or her need. Entice your customer to click on your content by writing a headlines that appeals — and of course matchs up fairly well to a query. I try to ask myself, if I can’t sell my customers service/product in my post, I am likely not writing good content. Good headlines help you convert more traffic to your content, well fitted content helps you pitch your product/service, funnels of course make it easier to convert this traffic to customers. So understanding how to write content less like C.S. Lewis and more like an SEO Copywriter matters? Oh my. I am see a full time content writer for my own brand, see — I am not even the best in the industry — Tim Suolo, Rand Fishkin, Joost de Valk — are a few of the leaders.
3. Use social media boosts to your advantage.
Social media campaigns can be highly targeted. Just as you would address a 50-year old customer differently than you might a 25-year old person, you can write to different customers in your marketing ads. And pictures, my how the pictures matter. Especially from women to men, old to young. Note: Have a customer in mind when you write your content. RESEARCH THE TOPIC. Now, that you’ve done that. Tell the story to gain traffic that has potential to become customers. How do I research the topic? Check the potential headline against something that actually has query numbers — if you use Adwords you can always use their tool. Always, always, always when writing content on your blog — think of the reader…and then the bot…same goes with writing to a potential customers needs, think of them first…and then the bot.
4. Write more than one copy.
A/B testing. Write about your topic from different angles, post those angles on different blog platforms…combine/condense those blogs into one enormously effective blog for your website. How will you know how your readership wants to read information without some testing? See what people like, need, want by seeing how many people actually search for it! Likely you already have content on your site covering these topics, so don’t write more! Turn your content into evergreen content, meaning, if the article you wrote isn’t time stamped and out of date after this year, continue to add to the copy — do not write multiple articles on your website about the same keyword, yes I can write many things about a topic, but I don’t want to have multiple articles fight for the same keyword — write one enormously credible article covering all of the aspects around said certain keyword instead.
Should I boost my content with social media ads? Of course. Ads on social media are inexpensive enough to let you run two separate ads with different headlines and images to see which one does better. A little A/B testing. But in real life, with limited resources and people…when I see one of my ads working with a small boost, I turn around and add much bigger ad spends on those ads. Horse buggy, buggy horse, save money and A/B test? I don’t know…you liked my ad, I spent more.
5. Send your customers into a sales funnel.
OMG Funnel, please funnel your leads. Look at my site for example — you have two options buy from us or work from us. Granted, there are more things a website can do, but other than rank for search terms that bring us hot leads — we don’t want our potential leads bouncing around our websites looking for a call to action or on the flip side a bunch of vanity stats (Millions of traffic and 10s of customers=vanity stats). Once you get someone interested in your product through an ad or organic post, you need to send that person into a funnel that will convert them into a customer/user. Don’t leave anything to chance, give your customers a clear, specific call to action.
6. Build rapport with the customer.
Today’s consumers want authenticity. Your brand has to be trustworthy. Don’t be a jerk and disrespect your audience and play head games. No tricks, just good content that is relevant to your customer. Meet with them where they are from LinkedIn groups all the way to Facebook groups — build rapport before you go and ask for favors in these groups too — soon as you become a spammer and not a contributor, you will be booted.
7. Optimize your technical SEO.
Check your website to ensure a good user experience. Make sure it’s Mobile Friendly. make sure it doesn’t have large images and laggy animations, 4XX errors, and other technical things by using Pingdom. Keep your pages below 1.5mb and the faster is typically the better. Speed matters, more speed matters more, to a certain extent and of course there are exceptions to the rule. If you can’t figure it all out, get caching plugins, Private Servers, a CDN (although I use Godaddy CDN Cloudflare of course is the top dog), do something for your poor visitors!
It doesn’t matter how good your content is if your website takes too long to load or doesn’t display correctly. Additionally, If your site isn’t indexed by the search engines, it will never rank. So make sure your robots.txt file isn’t janked up yoururl.com/robots.txt — read more about these issues from Yoast. The technical aspects of SEO are just as important as the words.
8. Respond to your followers.
Use social media and other profiles to your advantage by engaging with your followers. What is there besides the typical Facebook, Twitter, Instagram’s of the world? Google business page reviews and other review sites YP, Yelp, ShopperApproved, you see what I am saying. Let your marketing efforts target those who are looking for your product.
I could talk all day about this as I sit here all day and do these things and way, way more. But before I spill all the beans upon an unwanted audience. I should first know that this is even something people want to read…What else could I share, that you would find interesting? Maybe you could share with me and I could improve my own understanding!