You can’t make any posts reach significant people online without SEO. That’s because there are 99,000 searches on an average per second on google. That’s 8.5 billion by the end of day!
If you run a website, you simply cannot afford to ignore this. By optimizing your website for the words that your potential customers are typing into Google, you can jump into that enormous fountain-like flow of traffic.
The higher you rank for those valuable keywords, the more authority and trust you will earn, leading to higher conversions, and eventually earnings over the long haul.
Hence, if you don’t have SEO as a part of your marketing already, it is time you do. Here’s how to give your search visibility a boost this year.
Step 1: Discovering Your Most Valuable Keywords
Good keyword research is the backbone of every good SEO strategy. Find the keywords and phrases people are searching for when they are researching what you have – and match them to your site and your content.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to figuring out and picking the perfect set of keywords for your business.
Brainstorm Relevant Keywords
Then start to jot down keywords and phrases that relate to your products, services and brand. Do words pertaining to your ideal customers come to mind? What kind of solution might they need? If you covered a popular topic, what would those interested in that topic search for online?
Use Keyword Research Tools
Thanks to tools such as dedicated SEO keyword research tools (eg, Ahrefs, SEMrush and, of course, Google’s own Keyword Planner) and broader keyword dissection tools, your list will soon become somewhat refined. Here, you want to search for keyword ideas and look at the search volume estimates, along with score (difficulty).
Analyze Your Competitors
Follow the competition by analysing the keywords they currently rank for, which could create gaps where you can outrank them for certain terms that they aren’t optimizing for yet.
Include Long-Tail Keywords
Longer, more specific phrases – such as ‘soccer training programs for kids washington dc’ – are less competitive and bring highly targeted traffic. Find these long-tail opportunities.
Localize Your Keywords
If your services or products need to be localised, be sure to add your city, state or area in your keyword research – some site activity is rooted in local SEO.
Map Keywords to Pages
Then, start mapping those specific terms to the pages on your site that should rank for them, to guide your content optimization efforts.
As a result of this process, you’ll end up with a combination of higher volume keywords alongside some very long and (hopefully) very targeted long-tail terms that are very tightly woven into your business objectives.
These are the terms you will ‘optimize your pages for’ via on-page SEO and content creation.
Step 2 – Content Creation
With the keywords chosen, it’s time to start creating website content that can rank around those keywords. Two main optimization buckets to cover:
Craft Content That Comprehensively Informs
You want your content to provide immense value to searchers – not just pack in keywords! To rank highly, your pages should be better, richer, more engaging, and more useful and comprehensive than any competing page.
Ultimately, optimizing for the search engines is really optimizing for the human reader. Make sure that the stats, tips, explanations and actionable advice you offer are directly relevant to your topic (preferably in that order). This way, your content is crafted to answer every question that your ideal customer may have about that topic.
Optimize On-Page Elements for Discoverability
On the one hand, you want to create truly useful content; on the other, your pages have to be crawler-friendly if those pages are to stand a fighting chance of being found, and therefore appearing in search-engine results for the terms you’re trying to target.
Specific on-page elements to optimize include:
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Page titles: Place your most important keyword(s) as close as possible to the beginning of title tags, and aim to keep them under 60 characters.
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Sub-headings – Organise your content into topics and keywords with appropriate H2, H3.
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URLs - URLs with keywords can boost relevancy signals.
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Internal links – use anchor text with your chosen keywords when linking to existing content on your site.
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Meta descriptions - Craft compelling meta descriptions with keywords to generate clicks.
You optimize content for searchers and search engines simultaneously – maximizing both discoverability and CTR– and that is the content that can help get your site to the top.
Step 3 - Promotion and The Waiting Part
Creating an optimized piece of content is just the start. You then need to promote that content across channels to maximize its performance. And ongoing measurement provides valuable insights into what’s working to feed into future efforts.
Strategically Promoting Content to Earn Links
Posting well-optimized content will probably not get you major search rankings on its own. You need to combine your on-page SEO with purposeful promotion to develop valuable links and engagement.
Here are some of the top tactics for promoting content:
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Leverage social media – share your new or updated piece of content on every social media channel. Ask your followers to share the content if useful. Post on the relevant Facebook Groups or subreddits where your content fits.
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Pitch guest posting. Find industry sites that allow guest posts and pitch to submit a post with a natural link back to your site. Think of these places as maximizing your reach.
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Email outreach. Compile an email list of customers, partners, or other industry contacts that might want to hear about your new materials. Send occasional emails sharing your new content and resources.
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Internal link to it. Link to your new page from existing relevant content on your site. That tells Google that the page has new information.
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Comment on industry blogs. Write intelligent comments on blogs for your niche, and leave a link to back to your content if relevant. Pick high-quality blogs that are read by your target audience.
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Get it out there on multiple channels. Publish your content around the site wherever it makes sense, on your social profiles, your YouTube channel, your email lists, and wherever it appears it front of your audience.
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Revitalize your best content. Update your historically best-performing stuff on a regular basis. ‘Old posts’ can get new life through updated angles and recasts as ‘second generation’ guides.
The idea is to produce a natural drip of links/interaction to show search engines that your content is providing genuine value, and therefore your site’s visibility in search will grow over time.
Monitoring Content Performance and Search Rankings
You need to measure your content’s performance in search in order to diagnose what is helping (and what isn’t) so you can continue to refine while taking advantage of what is working.
Here are some key signals to track:
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Google Analytics. Check that new pages are bringing people to the site. Keep an eye on organic search channels for changes in volume and the terms by which traffic is being driven.
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If your site rank jumped significantly • if your site officially has more backlinks than your competitor (check this with your favorite backlink checking tool) • If your site saw more visits than competitors'. You can monitor this with Google Analytics. Watch for definite upward movements.
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Backlinks earned: Use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush to monitor new backlinks earned by each piece of content. The more that roll in, generally the better your rankings will be.
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Goal completions. Beyond rankings and traffic, track how many phone calls, form fills, purchases or other conversions are completed directly from organic search. This is real ROI.
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Indexing problems. Check Google Search Console to make sure pages are indexed properly. Look out for technical SEO issues.
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SERP analysis. You should check search engine results pages manually for the keywords you are focusing on. Are there content opportunities to optimize titles, meta descriptions, featured snippets, etc?
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Link opportunity identification. Use SEO tools to uncover prospects for gaining additional high-value backlinks.
Updating and Improving Content over Time
You’ll have to update your pages, if not every day, then at least several times a week. You have to keep things fresh in order to compete with other websites.
Reasons you may want to update existing content include:
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Adding new supporting research, stats, or examples
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Incorporating fresh multimedia like new videos
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Expanding shallow content by adding more detail
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Updating outdated or expired information
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Improving page speed or technical SEO issues
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Refreshing content with new images, headers, etc.
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Targeting additional related keywords
For pages in the search sweet spot, set up a quarterly cadence to review and improve performance.
This will allow you to sustain improvement with small updates that compound over time, ensuring continued high search rankings.
What's a Realistic Timeline for SEO Success?
The timeline would depend on how much authority your site already has, how competitive your keywords are, and how hard you’re willing to work.
Here are some rough guidelines:
1-3 Months
However, through optimizing easy, low-competition keywords, and improving existing content, you will see some small rankings increase in 1-3 months. Don’t expect miracles, though. At least not yet.
3-6 Months
With a well-executed, consistent and high-quality content promotion and link-building effort, and a healthy dose of monitoring for a period of 3-6 months, you can reasonably expect ranking improvements for low-competition keywords.
6+ Months
In highly competitive searches, it can take 6-12 months before you see even the slightest movement or break onto the first page when you put in a consistent amount of work However, the longterm traffic payoffs of SEO work make the effort worthwhile.
Takeaway
People are increasingly looking for answers, not speculation, and sharing their findings. Know what they search for and write something that can be of even more value.
Create a content your readers will love. Build authority and trust through interaction and proper recommendation over time.
Track your search rankings frequently to diagnose what’s working and what needs improvement.
