Most digital marketing campaigns share a few common goals; to increase traffic and visibility, to engage and connect with an audience, and to increase conversions. Search engine optimization, or SEO, should be an integral component of your advertising platform. When used properly, SEO helps you increase traffic, engagement, and conversions all at once.
Like all marketing, good SEO practices don’t come from some static formula. Rather, these practices must be fluid and dynamic to work effectively. Some of the techniques that worked last year might not work this year. In order to continue to drive traffic to your site and build your search engine ranking, you need to perfect a few basic aspects of SEO that are important this year.
Here are three essential SEO techniques that you needed to master in 2018.
High-Quality Content
High-quality content is still the king of SEO. You need to create content that viewers will connect with and engage with. Digital browsers are inundated with around 34 gigabytes of content every day, so your content needs to cut through the clutter and make a real impact on your audience.
Using high-quality content that provides interesting, entertaining, or useful information will help make your content memorable and valuable to users. This caliber of content helps you grab viewers, build relationships with them, and ultimately get the most out of Google algorithms.
Google’s Panda update can actually detect low-quality content and penalize your site for it, so you have all the more reason to build your site on high-quality content.
Remember, great content isn’t just about an interesting blog article or an intriguing story. Great content goes beyond establishing itself as meaningful for the particular brand that it represents. Infographics, images, videos, lists, and other content can impact readers even more than a traditional written post and are also more easily shareable. This shareability factor is crucial, as the shared content is also a great way to build backlinks.
Link Building
Just like maintaining high-quality content on your site, link building isn’t a new SEO practice. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on perfecting your link-building techniques. In the past, backlinks were all about quantity, but this approach no longer works. Now, the effectiveness of backlinks is all about the quality of the content they point to.
According to Joel Gross at Coalition Technologies, “if high-value websites link to your business, search engines view your site as having greater authority.” In other words, a few high-quality links help your site rank higher than a lot of low-quality links.
Guest writing, strong internal links, broken link reporting, high-quality content, and link indexing explorers can help you develop and build high-quality links that will increase your site’s visibility and drive traffic your way.
Make It Mobile Friendly
The world has gone mobile, especially search engines. According to Google, more searches occur on mobile devices than on desktop computers in the US. That means your SEO must target mobile platforms as well in order to be most effective.
You don’t need metrics from Google to know that more and more people use their phones to browse the web. Capturing those eyeballs should be a top priority of your SEO campaign. Make sure your website and the content you create to drive traffic are mobile-friendly and indexed properly.
Find SEO Success This Year
Mastering these three techniques will help your digital marketing campaigns flourished in 2016. Of course, these aren’t the only SEO techniques you should employ in your overall strategy, but they’ll certainly help you along the right track. The best SEO is fluid and flexible, understands the needs of each client, and focuses on spreading a culture, image, and brand across the web.
