If you’re like many of our customers, you want to rank better in search results, especially Google, to drive more customers. Everyone does!

Having a high ranking for primary keywords equals more traffic and customers.

Getting high keyword rankings in search engines is about creating quality content, targeted at the right audience, that helps your audience solve their problem.  Top search engine rankings for your branded keywords is easy.  But unless you’re a household name, then people probably aren’t searching for your company or product by name.  Even top brands that are household names often rank very poorly for non-branded terms.

Ranking for non-brand terms is your goal for search engines whether you are targeting local or national customers.  As we well know, people have ditched yellow page advertising because visitors are looking for companies online and with their mobile devices.
The search engines provide local results and national results when they feel it is appropriate.  So if you want your business or organization to be visible to people who haven’t heard of you or just want to look up your phone number, having good rankings in search engines is critical.

So what are some of the keys to great SEO?

1. Content that influencers in your industry want.
2. Create content that is relevant to the goals of your site, not your keywords.
3. Create content that helps your audience solve a problem and is interesting.
4. It is easily shareable to social media.
5. Good performance for desktop and mobile devices.
6. A great user experience that is well structured and a speedy delivery of content.
7. Well promoted to the right places so that even if Google stopped working, you’d still have plenty of referral traffic.
8. Long content tends to rank better than short content.
9. Create reusable with your other content that you can use in multiple places.
10. Even though it is focused, there should be variation in the type of content you publish (layout, purpose, media, target audience).

Tip: Regular audits of your site, organic traffic performance and target keyword visibility is critical to know how your site is performing and what steps may need to be taken to improve.  Search engines are always updating their search signals and as a business, we need to be able to respond to those changes as they occur.

Content Marketing to Influencers – Getting Those Valuable Links for SEO

Having great content is key, but if no one knows it’s there, it isn’t going to help them.

The problem you may be having is that you’re not an influencer, product leader or knowledge leader in your space. The influencers in your industry are the ones everyone is paying attention to and they won’t give their time to someone else that doesn’t provide value to their audiences.

So what do influencers and knowledge leaders pay attention to? That is your job to find out. This isn’t going to be an easy task.  You have to find out what their hot topics are, what they like writing about and then write about that.  But you can’t just regurgitate what they write.

You have to create value by providing some new insight that helps validate their point of view.  When you do that, typically they will share your content out to their audience. The more this happens, the more trust you can gain as an influencer worth watching.

Relevant Content That Solves Problems

Having an opinion is great, but it doesn’t really help anyone.  Marketing fluff of no use except when a visitor is ready to buy or wants a list of features and reasons to buy whatever you are selling.

The best content solves problems for your readers or entertains them. They should be able to walk away and say “Wow, that really helped me. I need to remember to come back and read more!”  This is going to lead to more subscribers to your email lists and get people talking about you, which is what we want after all.

Getting Great Web Core Metrics.  Yes, Website Performance Matters

Even if you’ve created a lot of great content, if you blow it technically, you’re wasting your time. Solving for technical issues for a basic WordPress site is easy, but if you have a complex user experience (more and more common these days), you have to really think about the SEO side or you’re just not going to show up.  Google has developed the Web Core Metrics which score your speed and user experience which will impact your rankings.

New ways of presenting websites as apps (progressive web apps) or vast e-commerce stores combined with good mobile experiences can add a lot of complexity and it doesn’t take much to make a mistake that will demote your content.  The search engines have not done a good job of keeping up with all the different ways of analyzing content and they still look at a single URL as a unique page. But the best experiences are no longer page-based, but more like the mobile apps where data is hidden until needed.

Just because your web developer creates a great user experience they may not know the first thing about SEO. Make sure your new mobile website and desktop experience aren’t actually hurting your hard-earned search rankings.