I have learned a lot from my SEO experience so far. Today, I am going to tell you my 6 lessons for SEO success.
Lesson 1: Keyword Research
The use of keywords has rapidly changed over the last few years with Google penalising websites that are over optimised. However, doing a keyword research before beginning a SEO campaign is still critical to how the campaign will do. The first tool I would recommend using is Google AdWords. This will give you the average monthly searches the keywords receive and the competition for each of these keywords. Try and select the keywords with the most search traffic and least competition. I would also suggest using ‘Google Suggest’ and ‘Google Trends’ too.
Keyword research before beginning a SEO campaign is still critical.
Lesson 2: Watch Your Competitors
It’s very important to monitor what your competitors are doing. You do not need to reinvent the wheel, so look at what your competitors are doing well and use that for your strategy.
“If you want to achieve success, all you need to do is find a way to model those who have already succeeded” – Tony Robbins
How do I do a competitor research you ask?
Thankfully there are LOADS of things to use to monitor competitors. Here are ways to spy on your competitors :
- Google Alerts:
Set up an alert on Google Alerts to monitor what your competitors are doing.
Google Alerts
- Backlink Watcher
Backlink Watcher is a free tool that lets you see what sort of backlinks your competitors have.
- Topsy
Topsy is a great tool to use for seeing what your competitors have been doing on Twitter since 2006.
4. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo gives insights into a competitor’s most popular content.
- Auction Insights
Auction insights is a fantastic feature of Google AdWords which compares your AdWords performance to other related websites.
Lesson 3: Look at Your Content
Creating unique content for your website and updating the website on a regular basis is critical to a websites performance online. Content marketing has established itself as one the most important aspects in any SEO campaign over the last number of years. What most people don’t realise is the positive impact that fresh unique content can have to a Digital Marketing campaign.
You need to create a content calendar and update the website on a regular basis. As we saw with the recent Google Panda update, google penalised websites that had duplicate content, so make sure that your content on website is not similar to other websites, as you could be facing a penalty soon!
Lesson 4: Social Media is critical for SEO performance
Social signals are becoming more and more important. Changes within the search engine algorithms have not just placed greater importance on the content, but they’ve also begun to rely more upon social signals to elevate results up the ladder in search ranking importance. Earlier this year, Twitter struck a deal with Google to re-establish their access to data via a firehose.
Google+ is a powerful weapon to improve your SEO campaign, especially for Local SEO results. The reason Google+ is an SEO goldmine is that the first link added to a Google+ page post is a Do Follow link, which means it passes link equity, or link juice, on to the website you share.
Lesson 5: Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Optimised
It’s more important than ever to have your mobile optimised, with the recent Google update in April. More and more users are using their mobile phones, rather than desktop. In May, Google made this announcement “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
How do your visitors react?
Lesson 6: Don’t over Optimise Website
The days of filling your chosen keywords in Meta Description, Title, keyword tags and content are long gone. It’s still important to have the keywords on the website but if you over optimise the website, you will get penalised. Focus on what the customer wants rather than what you think will get you ranking high on the search engines for keywords. 2015 is about User Experience, rather than on page SEO. Google can measure user experience as a factor in its ranking signals. Focusing on your visitors and considering their online experience is critical to your SEO success.
Avoid at all costs!
