SEO Strategies That You Would Surely Want to Know

It is probably obvious that by now you know how important SEO is for your online business, reputation, branding, and all that makes your business. As a matter of fact, chances are high that you’re already aware of how SEO works and the basics on how you can maximize your online sales, views, customer recruitment, followership, and growth of your business as an online entrepreneur. That’s why you’ll need a long-term and effective SEO strategy in place to be able to boost your organic traffic.

When we started BeeWits, we knew we wanted to do content marketing for boosting our organic traffic, but we hadn’t planned an effective SEO strategy, we were fumbling along and learning along the way.

We did get some organic traffic, but it was sporadic. Once we had discussed and started to implement a number of search engine optimization strategies, we quickly saw a boost in rankings and overall organic traffic.

It is important not to make one the most common mistakes made by online entrepreneurs – they tend to forget that just like most other areas in the digital world, SEO is continually evolving. Yes, the search engine techniques that worked a couple of years ago may still work in your favor, but today’s SEO 101 is definitely more detailed and deeper than the SEO strategies of a few years back.

In other words, it requires you to go the extra mile in your strategy to make the most out of your SEO efforts.

Speaking of strategy, here are a few of the top SEO strategies that you would surely want to know about, especially if you’re hungry for taking the lion’s share of the cake that your industry’s online target market has to offer.

1. Perform extensive keyword research

This remains one of the fundamental aspects of defining a successful SEO strategy.

The trouble with the strategy of most companies is this. They think they understand the market, or just mimic what other websites are doing. But they do this completely oblivious to what their target users are actually searching for.

So some of the content they might be writing might be targeting keywords which don’t have any search volume. Or they might be targeting content with keywords which are incredibly difficult to rank.

Unless one performs an extensive keyword research tool, using such tools as Ahrefs or Semrush, it will be impossible to make an educated guess about what content you will be able to rank or not.

Simply put, you’ll be shooting in the dark, wasting a lot of time and effort on what is effectively, guesswork.

Start your strategy by understanding exactly what keywords your users are searching for, which ones you are going to target, which ones you are able to rank and then set a long-term strategy of the topics and content you’ll be writing.

Keyword research per se is an extensive topic, so we won’t be writing about this here. You’ll find plenty of articles on the web which discuss how to do a proper keyword research exercise.

2. Utilize the power of mid and long-tail search keywords

Research has it, that long-tail keywords perform better on search engine results compared to the shorter ones. They might not outdo their shorter counterparts when it comes to traffic generation, by they are, sure as daylight, winners when it comes to specificity.

You definitely need to use high volume, short and middle keywords in your content. As a matter of fact, most long-tail keywords are simply extensions of their shorter versions.

Despite their lower search volume, using keywords that are less competitive and more specific can set you apart from the rest of the players – this is because these keywords are typically more targeted.

For example, at BeeWits, consider our strategy of opting to rank for several keywords related to web design. Rather than targeting the keyword web design per se, which would have been incredibly lucrative (but also insanely difficult to rank), we opted for multiple long-term variations of phrases which includes the keyword web design. This allowed us to still target our demographic, without having to go down the long hard road of ranking short-term keywords.

The best way to go about it is to utilize a mix of both short and long-tail keywords without over-optimizing or making your content spammy. Search engines value this. The best thing is that there’s a wide range of keyword research tools out there that you can use in your keyword strategy to include long-tail keywords.

Semrush and AHRefs are two good examples of such tools. SEO is arguably the mother of all things internet marketing, and if you’re looking for a magic pill in SEO, this is an SEO Backlink Strategy That Works Like Magic with SEOJet. But back to long-tail…

Wait; I know what some of you are thinking! Some of you are wondering what exactly are the benefits of long tail phrases for keywords? Well, below are a few of the advantages of using them.

Benefits of long-tail phrases

• They’re great for semantic search – With today’s technological advancements, a good number of users perform their searches using voice, prompts, questions, and commands. In most cases, these searches are specific, containing more than just two or three words at the minimum. For this reason, LTKs can a great strategy to target semantic search users.

 

• Higher conversions – There’s no need to beat around the bush on this one. Assuming all other factors (such as web design, customer service, calls to action, and other aspects of internet marketing) remain constant, your site’s sales conversion will greatly be dependent on the amount of traffic you receive. Designing your content such that it contains the relevant, short, as well as long-tail keywords, will ultimately lead to higher conversion rates. Needless to mention, here, the phrase conversion rate refers to the number of website visitors that actually end up making a purchase at any given time.

 

Let no one lie to you, conducting research and coming up with a list of appropriate long-tail keywords can be a heck of a challenging affair when done manually.

But thanks to advancements in SEO software tools, more than just a few online tools and software are available to help you do this as part of your SEO strategy within the shortest period of time. Some of them even have features that allow you to filter out what you might not need using certain parameters until you’re left with the most appropriate items. When dealing with lots of options to compile a list of numerous long-tail kws, you may want to use the following criteria.

• Choose a relevant topic
• Know your target audience’s search intentions

Once you have these two parts ironed out, implementing your SEO strategy is a matter of execution.

3. Optimize for voice search

Infographics from research show that over the past few years, quite a significant proportion of internet users are and have been using voice search.

And as if that’s all, the numbers have been speculated to increase over time. As a matter of fact, voice search statistics anticipate that by 2020, you won’t need a screen to perform one.

If you can ask google assistant for the meaning of a word or for the directions to a certain place of interest and it gives you an accurate answer (at least in most cases), why would it fail to give you a solution for the best places to buy an umbrella or the best lawyer in town?

This is something that you can take advantage of as an online entrepreneur and include in your SEO strategies. But how do you optimize for voice search?

The trick is simple, unbeknownst to many. Your content not only has to be informative, it also has to provide answers and solutions to problems and particularly questions that your target audience may have and are asking.

Within those solutions, you have to use the right long-tail keywords and have them featured in updated Google snippets. You have to design your website’s snippets strategically for them to gain favor in the eyes of search engine bots.

Nonetheless, it is highly important to keep your keyword phrases as short, straightforward, and specific as possible when optimizing for voice search. For the best results, it pays to think about using query phrases that are geared to answering the common questions regarding who, where, when, how, which, and what.

Another huge benefit of voice search is that Google tends to favor sites and pages that provide the most relevant answers to questions posed by internet users on the search engine. As a matter of fact, voice search is also a mobile-friendly internet search approach, which brings us to the next important SEO strategy every online entrepreneur should know.

4. Make your site mobile-first

In today’s world of advanced technology, a large percentage of the population own mobile devices. As a matter of fact, there are more people accessing the internet using their mobile devices compared to those who access the internet from desktop computers.

For this reason, chances are that most of your target audience is mobile internet users. And considering that people are spending a huge amount of time on their mobile devices, you don’t want to miss the opportunity.

One of the ways to maximize your SEO effort is to make it easy and convenient for your target site visitors to access and navigate your site from their smartphones and tablets without any hiccups.

And in case you don’t know how to make your site mobile friendly, it would mean investing in a good website designer to make your site mobile responsive. In a responsive website, the same content is displayed on the various web pages despite the device that is used to access the site.

Making your site friendlier for your mobile users allows you to avoid missing out on a highly significant amount of traffic, new clients, returning clients, and conversions. When a user unsuccessfully tries to access your site using their mobile device, they might as well never try to access it from any other internet connected device. In addition to using a responsive design, making your site mobile-friendly may involve imaging compression, using viewport meta tags, using mobile videos, using mobile-friendly fonts, and much more to improve mobile UX. Research actually suggests that doing this can improve your conversions by up to 24.5% or more.

But there is an even more important reason and why mobile-optimized sites are critical for your SEO strategy. Mobile-indexing is currently slowly being rolled out to all websites. This means, your site will be ranked according to what is visible when a website is accessed via the mobile version of the site. So if you have stuff which is missing or not visible when on mobile, you’ll be missing out on ranking for that content.

In a nutshell, making a site more friendly to mobile visitors will include:

• Use a responsive design
• Make your site more accessible
• Make it easy to navigate
• All the other SEO strategies
• Mobile-indexing is currently slowly rolling out

5. Aim for Google’s position 0

Most online entrepreneurs dedicated their SEO efforts toward ranking in position one or at least on the first page of Google SERP.

However, unbeknownst to many, there’s a feature on Google that is known as position zero, which is facilitated by Google’s Featured Snippets, it provides listings for the most relevant search results at the very top section of search engine result pages on top of the position 1 item.

Getting featured at position 0 can increase your traffic massively, increase your click-through-rate, and even boost your sales with an incredible margin.

Nonetheless, the most important thing is to know how the strategy works. Most internet users need quick answers when they perform their searches. If your site page provides the most relevant answer to a direct search query, higher chances are that it will be featured on position 0 whenever such a query is performed.

As part of your SEO strategy, use very simple sentences to answer particular search queries, which the algorithm can extract to use as snippets. If your competitors have won the snippet, mimic what they are doing on the page (in terms of HTML structure and tags they are using. If they are using numbered headers, do the same, if they are using bullets or ordered lists, do that on your site too).

Combine this SEO strategy with other SEO approaches as well as voice search and you will thank me later.

6. Make more use of creative video content

Well, as much as text content is perhaps the most popular way to get ranked high on search engines, you just can’t ignore the power of relevant, resourceful, creative, and even funny videos.

And assuming that you’ve heard of the controversial, yet true statement that content is king, video content is just as important in SEO as your blog posts, website pages, articles, product descriptions, email pitches, and other promotional material.

Dozens of research studies have found videos and images to be quite influential and engaging, sometimes perhaps more than text content.

It’s also very true, that after Google, the 2nd biggest search engine in terms of the volume of searches, is YouTube. So for sure, video needs to be an intrinsic part of your SEO strategy.

There are dozens of free video directories such as YouTube and Vimeo, which you can benefit from in promoting your business website through your videos.

However, you will need to conduct your research beforehand to determine the kind of videos your target audience would be fascinated by or interested in.

Also, you will want to either hire a video production agency to do it for you or invest in video production equipment to do it DIY. As a matter of fact, a simple video captured using a smartphone with a high-quality camera recorder could be all you need. It doesn’t even have to be too long – 2 minute videos are great.

It only needs to be engaging, attention-capturing, relevant, creative, and SEO-friendly. Additionally, you can also use short videos on your website to make it more engaging and improve your visitor’s interests.

Whether you’re promoting your video on YouTube, your website or any other social site, there are certain factors that determine how effective your video content will be in boosting your SEO efforts.

Some of these include the following:

• Video Description – Post your video with a short description or summary of what it is all about. Optimized video descriptions are good for your traffic and click-through rates.

 

• Tags – When using this feature, you have to put more than ten tags. This can be a perfect opportunity to target extra keywords so that your video reaches out to the maximum amount of internet users.

 

• Title – Video titles can also be used to target more keywords, which is great for your SEO. When well-optimized, some videos on YouTube even end up showing on SERPs.

 

• Channel Authority – When posting on YouTube, it is also important to optimize your channel so that it can easily be searched and found online.

 

• Content Delivery – Your content has to be resourceful, relevant, engaging, or even funny while still pushing the main agenda into the target viewer’s mind. To make the most out of your video content in SEO, it is important to be consistent, make several videos, be creative, and be consistent. Going viral with just one video can be effective, but it is good to keep your eyes on the long-term benefits of SEO.

7. Invest in local SEO

Especially for startups, it is extremely important not to forget optimizing for your local market.

Termed as local SEO, this may require even more research than when doing implementing a generic SEO strategy, especially in local markets where the competition is high.

Invest in link building, submit your site and business to local directories, use location-specific keywords, and look for reviews from your local clients.

As for the directory part, be sure to list your business information consistently to some of the most popular directories, especially Google my Business, Yahoo, Bing Me, Yelp, and Yellow Pages. As for link building, established backlinks with local authority sites in your area of business or industry at the local level. Local SEO is highly paramount for both young and established businesses looking to expand.

Wrapping up our SEO Strategy

The above are some of the best SEO strategies you should know about by now. In almost all of the 7 pointers above, your content will have to use backlinks, mostly to and from authority sites, social media handles, video sites, and so on and so forth. Luckily, there are a few tools that can help you do this without stressing too much over it. Of course, this is typically only the beginning, because once you’ve figured out the SEO strategy to follow, you need to follow it up with a link-building strategy, because it is through links that you can power up your content.