Back to Basics:  What SEO Tactics Matter & What Don’t

DD post pic 10.15.15opens IMAGE file The Essentials Of SEO Strategies in 2015

In the digital marketing world, you almost can’t go a day without referring to search engines and how you rank on them.  Seriously, when was the last time you talked about “google-ing something”? In our world today, it is of utmost importance what search engines think of you.  With many search engine options out there, Google still dominates with approximately 70% of searches being done through it, versus Bing, Yahoo, or other players.  The key here is that you should still care about how you are approaching SEO for your brand because the public is looking for brands online.  However, the rules continue to change with SEO and that makes it hard to keep up with to ensure that your brand is representing well on search engines.

Three Things To Chuck From Your Strategy:

  1. Writing Only For SEO:  Let us let you in on a little secret: if your article sounds like a robot wrote it and it is full of keywords that make no sense to the reader, search engines will know and it won’t be good.  They like to see relevant copy that real people can understand and make sense of.  Their algorithm can tell when you’re just stuffing for keywords, or truly writing something of value to the people in your industry.
  2. Manually submitting To Google To Be Indexed.  Google (and others) have sophisticated algorithms that can regularly pick up on updates you’ve made to your site.  There’s really no need to manually send them a notice that you’ve updated things. Efficient SEO can be easily picked up by the search engines without “telling” them.
  3. Building huge numbers of backlinks.  Links are still valuable, but the key is that you want “quality” links.  If you have a huge number of “relevant” backlinks, go for it.  However, backlinks for the sake of backlinks is not going to help you at all.  In fact, it might hurt you.  Google looks for relevance over quantity of links.

Okay…That’s Great, But What Should I Focus On Instead:

  1. Good User Experience.  A quality user experience will attract users to spend more time on your site, exploring more pages, and ultimately bringing more relevancy to your website in Google’s eyes.  That’s why Google puts such a high value on mobile friendly sites.  They want the user experience to be a good one in an age where mobile device use is rising dramatically.
  2. Local SEO.  Keywords are great, whether in long form or short form types, but they need to have a local focus to make any sort of dent in the land of search engines.  For example, wedding cake bakery is a great keyword, but wedding cake bakery in San Antonio is far better.
  3. Stop putting SEO in a box.  Search results are great, but they are not in an isolated box.  Search results now interact heavily with social media traffic and vice versa.  When you look at your digital marketing from a more comprehensive perspective, you can see that you need to have a handle on both SEO and social media to really grow your brand.  Yes, you want to rank well on search engines, but you should be thinking about this from a online branding perspective.  Positive social media helps you rank better on search engines, an quality search engine results drives people to interact more on social media, which all should point to more traffic to your website and more sales.  All parts work together to achieve a positive online presence for your brand.

Are you focusing your energy in the right direction?  SEO is constantly changing and only savvy marketers who are keeping a pulse on the trends will be able to keep up with the changes.  While there are so many changes to keep up with that it can be exhausting, we know that focusing your attention in a few good directions and turning your focus away from some previous strategies can help you start moving in the right direction.