In SEO, what you don’t know can really hurt you.
It can steal months of your time. It can cost you money. It can damage your brand. It may even threaten your sanity at times.
But an Expert SEO knows how to maximize their time and avoid the common pitfalls that can side swipe the best-laid plans. They know how to learn from the mistakes of others — before they have to learn from their own.
Let’s look at 5 expert SEO tips you need to know in order to leave the mistake-making to your competitors.
1) Screen Guest Posters
In your pursuit for more SEO-friendly content, an SEO could turn to user-generated content and guest post content. Both of these are valid ways to get more shareable, linkable content on your website and engage your customers.
We approve.
But remember that your customers will be reading this content. Whether you generated it or not, if it’s on your site, it becomes are part of your brand identity.
Screen content and don’t post inferior content on your website.
On this flip side of this, you don’t want to get in the situation of soliciting guest/ user content and then having to reject it. Someone put time and effort into that content.
Rejecting it would be bad for relationships and bad for business.
Instead, Do This
- Set clear standards for guest and user-generated content
- Post these guidelines clearly on your guest posting page
- Ask for sign off that they were read before someone submits content
- Let guests and users know up front that content may be sent back for revisions if it doesn’t meet standards
Each of these put the responsibility back on the guest or user to provide high-quality content. Ultimately, though, don’t be afraid not to post it.
An expert SEO knows that customer experience comes first.
2) Properly Balance Ads With Content
Search engines are continually updating their algorithms to block content that isn’t human-friendly.
A snippet of content engulfed in a sea of ads isn’t user-friendly. A page that has interstitials popping up to interrupt the user experience isn’t helpful. It’s annoying.
Your rankings won’t be rewarded in the long run.
To Remedy This
Screen affiliate programs. Evaluate affiliate programs give you the best bang for your buck. And become a minimalist to heighten customer experience and your rankings while maximizing affiliate revenues.
Avoid pop ups that invade a visitor’s space by taking up the whole screen. Google is really cracking down of these. And we can expect that onslaught of suffering rankings to continue.
3) Share Content Strategically
Social media and SEO go hand in hand. You generate content. You share it.
But there’s much more to it as an expert SEO will tell you. There’s a method to the madness that we call social.
Develop a Winning Strategy
- Evaluate your industry and business to develop content people actually want
- Have a clear purpose for each content piece (brand awareness, decision making, etc.)
- Develop content on a schedule
- Develop high-quality, SEO optimized content
- Analyse content metrics and develop more winning content
- Take time to craft compelling headlines
- Share regularly and repeatedly without spamming
- Share other non-competitor content aligned with your brand
4) Invest in Your Reputation
88% of customers turn to reviews as the source of truth about your business. They’re reading those bad reviews and looking at your good to bad ratios.
They’re influenced by good reviews. When they see them in locations like Facebook and your website, they feel “good feelings” about your brand.
When you’ve got a product or service, these favorable feelings can translate to increased traffic and sales conversions. They build brand loyalty and generate promoter activity among your existing customers.
These turn into more traffic and more sales. All of this is great for business and for your expert SEO plan.
Don’t underestimate the importance of managing your online reputation as part of your expert SEO strategy.
How to Do It
- Know what people are saying online
- Respond internally to concerns published online
- Create a review funnel to constantly bring in more great reviews
- Automate your review sharing process on social and your site
- Head off customer challenges with helpful content
- Manage customer relationships
Invest in reputation management tools that can automate and streamline many of these processes.
5) Create Backlinks the Natural Way
You already know that backlinks are a major part of ranking algorithms and essential to your SEO strategy. But as these algorithms continue to adapt, like most, you’ve likely seen your link-building efforts go up in smoke.
But there are ways to build links organically and naturally. You can align your link building efforts with Google’s goal of developing an algorithm that ranks only the highest authority sites — not those trying to game the system.
To do this…
Generate Linkable Content
Create fresh content that people are looking for. Evaluate trending topics. Understand what your customers and others in the industry want to know. Prominently display unique or hard to find fact or stats that people will want to link to.
Only publish high-quality content.
Optimize Content for People and Search Engines
Expert SEO strategists today know how to balance people friendly with search engine friendly. If it’s not engaging to people, it won’t attract backlinks.
Anchor Authority, Industry Relevant Pages Back to Your Site
No, this isn’t a trick that will get you penalized by Google once they catch on. When done right, this is the natural way to get relevant links back to your website. Within this strategy you produce (or buy) relevant, quality SEO optimized content that you then post on a relevant website as a guest post.
This guest post links back to your website through an an optimized anchor text. This demonstrates to search engines like Google that you’re not an island. You’re seeking to provide value to customers across the Internet.
That’s exactly what you should be doing as a business. And that’s how you increase your online ranking by building links naturally.
Look for tools that will automate the natural link-building process to maximize your efforts.
Expert SEO Tips and Tools
These tips will help you avoid some major mistakes with your SEO.
By applying them, you can maximize your time and effort to get results. Automating certain SEO processes allows you consistently and cost-effectively drive traffic to your site through better SEO.
To learn more about how to automate SEO processes to maximize your efforts, sign up to gain exclusive access to our industry-leading SEO tools.