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Search engine optimization has become one of the most powerful practices these days. But it has to be done with the right SEO strategy to make it worthwhile.
Everything works best only when done in the right way.
Else it can give adverse effects also. So what should be your SEO strategy 2020?
Remember, you only need to figure out the strategy to get the best results.
SEO has emerged as an effective medium to improve the website ranking and grab enough traffic for the website.
SEO is not all about only search engines.
Right SEO strategies have to be there.
Consequently, it will help to improve the users’ experience and make the results last longer.
Before forming any kind of strategy, planning is the basic step.
With proper planning, it becomes easy to eliminate unforeseen errors that can hamper the effectiveness of the SEO strategy.
So, there must be an SEO strategy plan that can help you to move in a definite direction for the success of SEO.
What is the SEO strategy plan?
A complete analysis of the website
Before forming any SEO strategy, it is important to find out the scopes of improvement on the website.
Use the best SEO tool to find out what’s working in favour of your website and what’s not.
Adding this kind of approach to your planning, spotting the strengths and errors become hassle-free.
No journey is started without a destination.
Do you know what does this means?
Does this mean until you are not aware of what is your final goal how will you make strategies to achieve it?
In the same manner, at the initial phase of planning, a complete examination of various elements of the website is the must.
You need to find out what kind of errors or issues are affecting the website SEO.
This will give you a fixed direction on which you have to work. Also, you can form the strategies as per the requirement of the website.
Or we can say, after getting familiar with the issue you can form the strategies to resolve it.
Work on keyword selection
Right keywords are the basics of successful SEO. Therefore, keywords must always be the part while planning for SEO strategy.
The selection of keywords is a very crucial step that has to be considered on a serious note.
If the right selection of keywords can make the SEO successful. In the same manner, the wrong selection of keywords can ruin the whole efforts put in SEO.
Working on the short tail keywords, long-tail keywords, exact match, broad match, etc. should be part of your planning.
There must be a list of keywords that are closer to the business and are highly relevant.
So, to work on all these aspects there must be a proper plan.
Execution of the planning
Making plans does not guarantee success. Instead, proper execution of the planning is the backbone. SEO strategy plans must consider the factor of execution.
Sometimes even the good strategies fail due to improper execution. This means to need to keep an eye on the implementation of the plans as well. This will help you to make your SEO strategies more effective and result-oriented.
On the other hand, working on the implementation you can easily reduce the possibilities of errors.
SEO analysis must hold a place in your plan
The success of anything can be measured only after analyzing the results.
So to find out the results of the SEO strategies, the analysis is quite important.
What if all the efforts are going waste? Whatever strategies you are forming they are not working as you as expected.
So these are the basic situations from which you need to be familiar.
By analyzing you can easily find out what is working and what is not? Further, you can improve the low productive elements to increase productivity.
Now as you are well-versed with the importance of planning. It’s time to discuss what kind of techniques you can infuse in the SEO. So let’s have a look at:
What is an SEO technique?
The SEO process is also done in two ways from which you need to be acquainted with to form the perfect strategies.
SEO techniques are divided into two categories which are-
White hat techniques
This is the technique that has multiple advantages and considered good from the search engine optimization perspective.
The content formed under this technique is always genuine and is not created with a purpose to deceive the people or Google.
White hat techniques are always compatible with search engines and do not beach and guidelines of the search engines.
Using this technique, the content created is highly valuable to the users.
The best part is if a web page is ranking good for a particular keyword then definitely the page contains the valuable information about that keyword.
Webpage created using the white hat technique contains qualitative content. And such type of web pages never intends to fool the users.
As a result, this technique is a good method to bring quality traffic and conversions.
Black hat techniques
A content that is formed by the black hat technique is just to improve the ranking anyhow.
A content is overstuffed with so many keywords to rank in the search engines.
Such kind of content somewhere deceive the users and hardly adds any value to the readers.
Usage of irrelevant keywords and repeating them in meta tags are also some of the practices that are part of the black hat technique.
Apart from this, sometimes a webpage rank for a particular keyword but when a visitor clicks he hardly finds and valuable information. Or he is redirected to any other webpage.
Content formed under the black hat SEO technique is generally low-quality pages. It hardly brings any conversion and leads to spamming which is not good for the health of the website.
Such kind of tactics is opted to improve the ranking by hook or crook. But Google is smart enough to judge everything. Ultimately, this technique takes the website nowhere.
Now as you are aware of the techniques, you can easily conclude what kind of a technique is beneficial for your website.
Hence, to improve the performance of SEO using the white hat technique there have to be some strategies that can give you unprecedented results.
Ok, let’s ask a question to yourselves.
Do you simply need SEO services or you need SEO services with the right strategy?
Ok, let’s proceed further and have some clarity in your thoughts.
Benefits of SEO Strategy
As time changes, the techniques and strategies also change.
You cannot rely on old age SEO strategies to get the best in the present scenario.
Because outdated strategies are no more welcomed anywhere.
Instead, SEO experts keep themselves updated with the latest trends and techniques which are working well in the market.
Updation in SEO techniques means something new and better has evolved.
Furthermore, this leads to an increase in the effectiveness and productivity of SEO.
(a) Increases effectiveness of SEO
Anything that is done with a strategy gets better results.
This is because it involves proper methods to do it.
Using the right techniques in SEO makes it quite easy to work on every element.
Ultimately, it will make every element to work at its best.
Whether it is about titles, meta description, alt tags, etc.
Everything will be optimized in a detailed way.
(b) Fewer Possibilities of Errors
Any kind of error in SEO can affect its results.
So, why not do it with proper planning and strategy.
SEO strategies help to do everything in a planned manner using the best ways.
Furthermore, leading to a reduction in errors.
Many times there are very common errors that are hardly noticed.
But they do have an impact on the results.
And this is just because moving ahead without any strategy.
SEO strategies make it easier to do things flawlessly and eliminate the possibility of errors as well.
(c) Helps to Beat the Competitors
We cannot deny this fact that in this digital era, everyone is familiar with the importance of SEO.
Hence, everyone is heading towards SEO services.
But have you ever thought about how one can distinguish his SEO work from others?
What will make your SEO more effective in comparison to others?
Above all, this is SEO strategies.
Right, and updated strategies give your SEO a competitive edge over the brands who have done SEO without strategies.
In this manner, you can surpass your competitors and take advantage.
Now, being familiar with the importance of SEO strategy, hopefully, it’s clear why every business needs SEO strategies.
Before moving towards evergreen strategies lets have a look at the SEO strategy checklist that can assist you to make powerful strategies.
- Long-tail keywords
- Keyword in URL
- URL structure
- Title tag
- Image alt tag
- H1, H2, and H3
- Meta description
- Synonyms and LSI keywords
- Broken links
- Loading speed of the website
- Quality of content
- Duplicate content
- Length of the content
- Accurate and valuable content
- Users’ experience
- External Linking
- Internal Linking
These are some factors that can help you to create effective strategies. By checking the above-mentioned factors you can easily figure out which area needs improvement.
Hence you can form strategies accordingly to make the best use of every component of the website.
Let’s move ahead and discuss what are the best and evergreen SEO strategies that will help you to get long-lasting results.
1. Attractive titles and descriptions hold the power to freeze the visitors
What is the first thing that grabs the immediate attention of the visitors when someone visits a page?
Of course, it is the title of the page.
The title of the page has a great impact on the SEO results.
This part cannot be ignored at any cost.
This is the fact, that no visitors would love to invest their time until they find something relevant to their search query.
A title should be that much compelling and expressive that it can tell what the content is all about.
Titles that convey a clear message are quite SEO friendly.
Tips to optimize the title and description for SEO
Do enough research on keywords and phrases.
Figure out what kind of keywords and phrases are getting good impressions.
Add your focus keyword or key phrase in your title and meta description. This will help to generate more clicks.
Do not overstuff your titles with keywords
Keep title under 60 characters only
Your title should be impactful and convey a clear message to the users
Title tags help search engines to understand the context of the content.
These tags are not only good from SEO but also for the users as well.
Users can easily understand what is the content all about by simply looking at the title.
Title tags are also good for the social platform as well.
Because social network uses the title tags to determine what should be displayed when someone shares the blog post.
2. Evergreen content helps your website to stay evergreen
Quality content is one of the vital factors that not only contribute to improving the website ranking but also add value to the users.
Hence, it’s better to create evergreen.
It will help you to get long-lasting results and this is something really good from a long-term perspective.
Wait, wait, wait…
Are you not aware of what is evergreen content?
Don’t worry let’s discuss it in brief:
As the name says it all.
Evergreen content is the content that always adds value to the users.
It hardly matters whether how old the content is.
It will work for a longer time and give long-lasting results.
For example:
One content is having the title: Importance of SEO
The second one is having the title: SEO Latest Updates
The first one can be considered as evergreen content.
This is because the importance of SEO will hardly change with time.
It will always add value to the users whenever they want to know about SEO importance.
But if we talk about the trends, it will surely change with time.
As the updates change very frequently.
Once your website has secured a good position in the SERP.
It will stay for a longer period due to evergreen content.
Ultimately, good positioning will reward you with more number of quality leads, conversions, online sales, and profit too.
Tips to optimize content for SEO Focus on quality of content. It should be grammatically correct and accurate in information. It should fulfill the search intent of the users and satisfy them. It must be created keeping focus keyword in mind. Do not use over stylish fonts. Content must be easily readable and understandable. Keep the length of content somewhere between 1500-2000 words for better ranking. Do internal linking and provide useful outbound links also.
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3. Mobile-friendly websites experience a large volume of traffic
The market for mobile users is expanding at a faster rate.
So, the importance of mobile cannot be ignored when it comes to SEO.
Nowadays most of the searches are made using mobile phones.
Such a scenario urges for mobile-friendly website designs.
A website which is compatible with mobile devices can easily target mobile users.
This will help to increase the traffic of your website by targeting more people.
As we all know, now people are more into mobile phones, tablets, and other mobile devices.
Hence, the mobile-friendliness of the website has become quite essential to get more traffic.
Just don’t go on my words.
Even the Mobilegeddon algorithm update has validated this statement.
“According to Google’s Mobilegeddon algorithm update of 2015, the priority will be given to those websites which are compatible with mobile phones and other devices.”
This update has come up to favor the mobile-friendly web designs.
Ultimately, boosting their ranking in the SERP.
While SEO there are so many factors that are taken into consideration to improve the ranking.
One of them is the users’ experience.
Mobile-friendliness is also one of the essential factors which are used to enhance the website users’ experience.
Additionally, it will also help to raise the effectiveness of your website and get a good response from the various segments of users.
Some tips to make a website mobile friendly Do perform a check to test the mobile-friendliness of the website. There are many tools available to perform this test. Use large and readable fonts. Use quality images on the website to ensure clarity on mobile phones as well.
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4. Voice search is pacing up at the exponential rate
The use of voice search option is growing very rapidly.
This option has provided the feasibility to even those users who were unable to make searches earlier.
But now they can easily make searches using their voice.
We can easily notice that now voice search also holds a good percentage in total searches.
Therefore, this is the demand of the situation that voice search optimization must also be considered while SEO.
This will help to target those users also who are making searches using their voice.
As in SEO keywords are used to get the relevant and quality traffic.
In the same manner, to optimize the voice search, conversational keywords are used.
Voice search optimization will help to improve the website ranking for voice searches.
Have you ever thought that will your website appear in the searches made using the voice?
If not…then think about it.
It may be or maybe not.
But with voice search optimization you can make your website appear for voice search also.
If the website consists of conversational keywords then it is more likely to appear in the search results.
Even Google is also quite concerned about the future of voice searches.
“According to the Google Hummingbird algorithm update, the focus will be on the meaning of the phrase rather than the individual keywords.”
The update has shown the bright future of the voice searches.
As now search engines will provide accurate information just by understanding the intent of the voice search.
Instead, waiting for someone to type the keywords.
Tips for voice search SEO Make sure the website is loading fast. Average loading time of website for voice search is 4.6 seconds. Use simple and easy to understand content on your website. Long content is always good for the voice search SEO.
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5. Lengthy content is one of the tricks to add value to the users
Many times the length of the content is not taken seriously but it somewhere affects the ranking of the website.
It has been observed that content which contains word count between 1500-2000 has a better ranking in comparison to the content with less than 1500 words.
It doesn’t mean that short content does not rank well.
Just the thing is Long content is written in a very detailed way.
Therefore, it covers a wide range of topics and provides diverse information must on one platform.
Such content helps to add more value to the users.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”A content that seems valuable to the users automatically becomes valuable to Google” quote=” A content that seems valuable to the users automatically becomes valuable to Google” theme=”style5″].
Such kind of content is more likely to be displayed in SERP by Google.
Lengthy content generally contains more keywords.
Ultimately, driving the content to rank for more than one keywords.
And one cannot get out of this fact that better ranking means better visibility.
As a result, better visibility ends up with more clicks and conversions.
This is one of the best strategies to get organic clicks and increase online sales.
And I guess these are the main purposes why the business needs SEO services.
Isn’t it interesting?
But this is not all…
Long-form content attracts more social shares and also helps to make the link building better.
Social sharing increases the reach of the content which in return brings users to the website.
At last, leading towards more sales and revenue.
Additional tips: Never compromise on quality while focusing on content length. Do not scare your readers with long content in a first glance. Instead, break the paragraphs into short and simple sentences.
6. Users experience do have an impact on SEO
Never underestimate the user experience factor when it comes to SEO.
Although it sounds beneficial for the users somewhere Google rewards those websites which are user-friendly.
If you optimize the website just for Google, it may affect the sales of the business.
But if the primary focus is on users’ experience, it will end up with a high conversion rate and good ranking as well.
There are a few elements to take into consideration.
They will help you enhance the user experience of your website.
The loading speed of the website is the primary thing that has to be considered at any cost.
Else if the website takes a pretty good time to load, it may be abandoned by the visitor without opening it.
Try to make the website visually appealing to increase the dwell time of the users.
Dwell time is the time spent on the website before returning to the SERP.
Keep the website navigation simple and sorted.
Complex navigations generally confuse the visitors and become a hindrance restricting the users to take the desired action.
Good users experience someday or the other convinces the users to make the purchase.
As a result, sooner or later Google rewards such websites with a higher ranking.
Tips to enhance the user experience Optimize images for fast loading of the website Add infographics on your website to add visual appeal
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7. Satisfying the search intent has gelled up in the basics of SEO
Search intent has become quite an important part of the SEO point of view.
As the name indicates, search intent is all about what is the intention of the user to search.
This includes what all a user is searching for to find out.
It can be any kind of information, any answer to a question or any product query, etc.
As Google is becoming advanced day by day, it is focusing more on search intent.
The page which is providing sufficient information against a search query and satisfying the
search intent of the user tends to rank higher.
Hence, it has become important from the SEO perspective.
That why it is always advisable to produce valuable and quality content.
So, a customer can get all the information what he is looking for.
For example:
A user makes a search query to find out ‘CRO tools’ but after opening the page he only gets to know about the importance of tools.
In this scenario, the search intent of the user is not satisfied as he was interested to know the tools in place of its importance.
Therefore, such pages are restricted by Google to come up in the top searches.
Tips to optimize content for search intent Choose wisely the type of result you want to display to the users. Example: videos, text, infographic etc. Emphasize on the keywords you are using. Use the keywords for which user intent can be satisfied.
I hope using these strategies you can easily keep the effectiveness of SEO alive. Furthermore, you can expect long-lasting results which are good for the growth of the business.
Now its time to check out:
What are some SEO best practices that are generally used by the SEO experts to boost the SEO results?
Include keyword in the Title tag
Do focus on the title tags as they matter a lot in SEO.
The title tag must be different for every page.
The main this is a title tag must always contain the main keyword.
It is always recommended to use short title tags.
It should not be more than 60 characters.
Keep the URL structure short
Keep the URL always short and simple. Do not go for long and complex URL’s.
Add keyword in Meta description
Always add a compelling and influencing meta description.
It tells the visitors what your blog post is all about.
If it is compelling enough only then people will open it.
Try to provide accurate information in the meta description that your blog is containing.
150 to 160 characters is the recommended length for the meta description.
Use quality content
Make use of highly valuable content on the website that can add some value to the readers.
It must be enriched with facts and figures, pictures and videos as well.
It should be qualitative and grammatically correct.
Add only fresh and unique content which is not copied from anywhere.
This will help your website to rank better in the SERP.
Enhance readability using headings
Make complete use of Heading1, heading2, and heading3.
This will make the content more attractive and easily understandable by the readers.
Use your main keyword in the Headings to optimize them.
Do internal linking in the blog posts
Internal linking is an important practice to improve SEO results.
Internal linking is linking one webpage with another on the same website.
Through internal linking, you can tell the search engines that this page is relevant for this particular keyword.
In this manner, you can strengthen the web pages.
Add image alt tags
Adding an image alt tag makes the image valuable to Google.
Google is bad at identifying what is an image all about.
Hence, add the image alt tag, this will describe to the Search engine what your image is all about.
Using this practice you can easily make the images searchable.
Using keywords in a proper manner
Add the main keyword at least once in the first paragraph.
This will make your content easily understandable by Google.
The keyword must also appear in between the content.
And at last, add your main keyword in the last paragraph as well.
Do not overstuff your content with keywords, it will lead to spamming only.
Conclusion:
At last, we can conclude an improvement in the traffic volume and website ranking with SEO is not a big deal.
But only when done with the right SEO strategy.
The effectiveness of SEO is all dependent on what kind of strategies you have adopted to make the website elements work.
Changing times also leads to a change in strategies.
Hence, one needs to keep on researching the kind of strategies that are working best in the market.
On the whole, it will help you figure out the new ways of SEO to stay one step ahead of your competitors.