Successful SEO requires close attention to a myriad of details. But Living Streams’ observation, since it started supporting businesses on their SEO activity in 2008, is that there are some key fundamentals which, if ignored, cause it to be unsuccessful.
Note: We measure SEO ‘success’ by the increase in a website’s organic search visits. In SEO terms, ranking is vanity and relevant visits are sanity.
Since 2012, a fundamental of successful SEO is ongoing content marketing. It is crucial to obtain maximum direct business benefit from your content as well as its contribution to SEO.
- Target topics rather than individual search phrases (keywords). For each topic, determine a cluster of relevant keywords for linking purposes. Choose topics with adequate search frequency where it is realistic to think that you can out-rank competitors
- Structure the website’s URLs to make it easy for search engines and visitors to recognise the silos of information on your chosen topics. In terms of a blog, this means using the chosen topics as the categories and setting the URLs to domain/category/post-title
- Ensure that, for each chosen topic, the highest ranked page is the one that you choose. Optimise each of these target pages for the primary keyword. Ensure that the page targeted for highest ranking for a topic actually ‘converts’ relevant search visitors into leads or customers – this can be tested with Adwords prior to starting an SEO programme.
- Regularly monitor the organics search performance of your website and those of your key competitors. Regular external auditing of SEO activity to ensure that all SEO factors are being implemented
- Monitor for relevant hot topics and write posts on them. Link to posts in social media updates, in email newsletters and from entries in relevant social media discussions. Monitor how many times each blog post is read.
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- Effectively get readers of your blog posts to move to your SEO target pages
- One 900 word blog post is better than three 300 word blog posts. Publishing 1 blog post a week achieves more than published 4 posts in a week and then none for the next 4 weeks
- From mid-2018, Google is using its mobile ranking algorithm even for searches from desktops.
- Be aware when keywords within targeted topics are treated as ’local’ by Google. For these, search results (SERPS) follow up to 4 Adwords adverts with a maps box and several (3 at this time) Google MyBusiness entries. Ranking within these entries depends on factors such as location, declared categories, citations (e.g. in online directories), details within the entries and regular good Google reviews
- Rankings are also impacted by factors such page load times, perceived website country, whether a site is http or https, language and external links into the website (a minefield of restrictions, relevance and quality)
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Living Streams offers a flexible mix of SEO advice, mentoring and implementation. It is also a Google Partner and certified by them in Adwords and Analytics.
Carol Naylor-Moore the marketing manager of QSoftware, an international financial compliance software company, said “We were wary about SEO advice until we implemented the resilient SEO process recommended by Living Streams, and found that it worked. Now we’re working with their advice and mentoring on an ongoing basis to produce and use content in a way that boosts our search ranking for relevant topics. Living Streams provide an extremely affordable way of implementing SEO compared to other marketing agencies.”
To explore how your business could work with Living Streams on a ‘Resilient SEO’ programme, contact Tony Thornby 01494 440019, tony.thornby@living-streams.co.uk