Is SEO dead? 

No, it’s not. (I’ll explain below)

Will SEO exist in 10 years? 

Yes, it will. (In some form or fashion)

What’s the future of SEO? 

A marriage between AI, SEO, & Humans. 

Do I have your attention? 

My name is Connor Gillivan. I’m an SEO and Entrepreneur. I’ve built multiple businesses online in the past 10 years to 6, 7, & 8 figures using SEO w/ an exit in 2019. Today, I teach SEO to millions through LinkedIn and my personal website. 

In this article, I’ll break down simple-to-understand answers on the future of SEO so that you (as a marketer, SEO, or entrepreneur) can benefit from SEO instead of being dominated by it. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• 5 Predictions About the Future of SEO
  • #1: AI & ChatGPT Will Enhance & Hurt SEO
  • #2: GrE-A-T Content Will Win the SERPs
  • #3: Mobile & Voice SEO Will Continue to Rise in Popularity
  • #4: The Best “System SEOs” Will Outlast the AI Rush
  • #5: Is SEO Dead? Absolutely Not. Will SEO Exist in 5 Years? Yes! Here’s Why
  • Actionable Steps to Tap Into the Future of SEO

5 Bold Predictions About the Future of SEO

In the next 5 to 10 years, SEO will undoubtedly change. 

It’s been that way for the past 20 years since Google was founded and search engines became a staple in all of our digital lives. 

This idea of “seo is dead” isn’t a new one either. 

It’s been said time and time again, but SEO continues to grow and live on. 

Why? 

Because people still have questions that they want answers to. 

That’s the core of SEO. 

Let’s dive into 5 predictions I have about where SEO will head next.  

#1: AI & ChatGPT Will Enhance AND Hurt SEO

I believe in looking at both sides of the argument. 

Some think AI is a godsend for SEO and others argue that it’s the worst thing that could happen to SEO. 

I see both sides and I take the pros and cons into account as I incorporate AI and ChatGPT into my SEO processes and strategy. 

Let’s break it down.

How AI Enhances SEO: 

• Speed up SEO processes that were manual before.
• Help marketers better understand their customer avatar. 
• Open marketers up to new ideas they didn’t have before. 
• New tools to make the research & optimization process better.  

How AI Hurts SEO: 

• Marketers relying solely on ChatGPT and AI writing tools.
• Massive influx of poor quality AI generated blog content.
• Race to the bottom w/ AI generated content. 
• Make marketers think they can do SEO w/out all of the other steps involved.

It ultimately comes down to HOW you USE AI for your SEO. 

If you try to abuse it, it will most likely come back to bite you. 

You’ve Been Taught SEO ALL WRONG

Become a Certified Search Marketing Specialist and Start Boosting Your Sales by Attracting and Converting Your Ideal Leads Everywhere They Are.

Click here

If you intelligently build it into your current SEO processes and stay focused on high quality content targeted at the customer’s search intent, you should be in good shape. 

#2: GrE-A-T Content Will Win the SERPs

With that understanding under our belts, let’s talk a bit about what type of content will reign supreme in the next 5 to 10 years. 

It’s GrE-A-T content!

What is GrE-A-T Content? 

Here’s a spectrum to define it for you…

• Bad: Solely AI generated. No editing. No optimization. 
• Poor: Human written. No keyword research. Minimal optimization. 
• Good: Human written. Keyword research. Okay optimization. 

GrE-A-T: Human written. Displaying Experience, Expertise, Authority, & Trustworthiness. 

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. 

It’s a measure that Google takes into account when rating content published on the Internet. 

When creating SEO content, you want to hit on E-E-A-T as much as possible.

Granted there may be adjustments to it over time, it all comes back to creating the best possible content for people searching on Google. 

That’s what will continue to win, no matter how AI impacts the process. 

#3: Mobile & Voice SEO Will Continue to Rise in Popularity

According to Exploding Topics, 56.8% of searches are performed on mobile. And that figure has doubled since 2015. 

Similarly, 50% of the US population uses voice search features daily (according to Oberlo).

As mobile phones and voice enabled devices become more popular in households worldwide, we’ll see increasing amounts of searches performed with them. 

AI and companies like ChatGPT contribute to mobile and voice search experiences enhancing the ability for new features to increase growth. 

As we approach SEO over the next 5 to 10 years, voice and mobile will rise in importance. 

#4: The Best “System SEOs” Will Outlast the AI Rush 

All content is NOT created equal. 

It’s the System SEOs that go above and beyond to create the highest quality content on the internet. 

What’s a “System SEO”? 

System SEOs = SEOs & marketers that are experts on the end-to-end SEO process and build systems and processes to support high quality at quantity. 

The end-to-end SEO process: 

• Competition research
• Keyword research & clustering
• Content planning & clustering
• Matching intent
• Drafting outlines from 1st page SERPs
• High quality human written content
• Content editing & optimization
• Quarterly upgrades
• Backlink building

AI tools can help SEOs & marketers in the entire pipeline. 

The craze right now is ONLY focused on one of the stages: Writing content. 

As AI tools progress and get stronger, they’ll bleed into all areas of the SEO pipeline. 

You’ve Been Taught SEO ALL WRONG

Become a Certified Search Marketing Specialist and Start Boosting Your Sales by Attracting and Converting Your Ideal Leads Everywhere They Are.

Click here

The SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs that focus on building a high quality content creation system will be the ones that win in the short and long run. 

#5: Is SEO Dead? Absolutely Not. Will SEO Exist in 5 Years? Yes! Here’s Why

At its roots, SEO is all about your ideal customer avatar. 

Customer avatar = your ideal customer that you want to reach with your business. 

SEO is answering questions for your customers & providing them with answers to questions, pains, problems, and frustrations that they have. 

Yes, Google’s AI generated content will be able to answer questions to a certain extent, but millions of people will still seek deeper answers, content, services, and products. 

People will still see a brand on social media or in an advertisement and want to know more. 

Where will they go? Google and other search engines. 

The same goes for people wanting to learn about specific topics, concepts, ideas, etc. 

I argue this customer trend will continue to thrive in the next 5 to 10 years. 

Actionable Steps to Tap Into the Future of SEO

The future of SEO is exciting! (If you’re an SEO or marketer that believes in SEO).

With the power of AI, creating high quality content will become more and more efficient. 

Here’s 7 SEO tips to take action on today: 

1. Focus on your ideal customer – over everything else!
2. Test out the new AI tools
3. Learn the end-to-end SEO process
4. Optimize an SEO system w/ efficient processes
5. Design with mobile first in mind
6. Focus on 10/10 GrE-A-T content
7. Optimize often w/ intelligence

If you follow these in the next 5 to 10 years, you’ll be in great shape to adjust to the AI changes. 

Just remember: It’s all about the reader and customer. 

Conclusion on the Future of SEO

The future of SEO is upon us. 

In just the past 12 months, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of change to the industry. 

But that doesn’t mean SEO is dead. 

In fact, it may be more alive than ever. 

With ChatGPT and AI tools, SEO content can become even better than it was before. 

It’s a matter of combining SEO + AI + Humans to create the highest quality content on the Internet. 

Join that tribe and let’s make the future of SEO a bright one!

The post The Future of SEO: 5 Bold Predictions Based on 10 Years of SEO Experience appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Content is considered to be the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.

What exactly does that mean?

Why is content so important for search engine optimization?

First Things First: What’s “Content Marketing?”

Content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content in order to drive brand awareness, traffic and sales.

Please note if your content isn’t valuable, relevant and consistent, it’s not content marketing. If it’s not driving profitable customer action, it’s not marketing.

Gone are the days when you could have just used your target keyword a certain number a times across your document to convince the algorithm that your content is relevant to that search query.

Google has come a long way since then.

Its innovative algorithm is implementing artificial intelligence to teach the algorithm to think like a human being. It is using a variety of signals to evaluate how useful any search result turned out to be.

There’s no faking true value any more.

Authentic value always comes first.

Why Content is So Important for SEO?

Content is traditionally fundamental to SEO because Google needs words and text to understand relevancy.

Even decades after Google algorithm was born and now that Google can now read visual and video content, Google still admits relying on text for the most part:

With that in mind, how exactly does Google understand quality and relevancy, when it comes to textual content?

What is High Quality Content?

Truly Useful Content

Number one, just be awesome at what you do. Google is getting better and better at being able to differentiate what people are really asking for.

Be very clear about who you are and what you do. It’s not guaranteed that you won’t run into those problems, but Google is getting better at figuring out the intent of a query and really finding what the best result should be.

Authenticity and transparency go a long way. It is not about faking relevance and quality signals. It’s about really solving the problems behind search queries.

As a result, it’s getting harder for affiliates and resellers to suck traffic away from brands in branded search queries, without the brand having to do much SEO improvement on their part.

Content and Link Building

There’s another distinct benefit of creating content for your business site: Content attracts links, and without links, there are no rankings.

Content-driven link building is the only safe link building out there: You generate links via creating linkable content. There are multiple formats and tactics behind creating linkable content, and you will need to experiment with all of them to find what works in your niche:

To help your content drive links, reach out to bloggers and journalists in your niche and invite them to read your content and link to it. This is a slightly overused but still perfectly legit and effective way to get backlinks. Use Hunter to easily find emails of bloggers’ and journalists’ you think would be interested in your content.

Their Email Verifier feature is also very useful for cleaning your existing email lists and getting more out of your outreach methods.

Content and SEO: They Only Win Together

So it is quite clear that SEO isn’t really possible without content.

Can content exist without SEO?

It actually can.

But unless you keep SEO in mind when creating content, you rely on a sheer chance to have it ever discovered or found.

When it comes to business and marketing, relying on luck is never a good strategy. You need data and planning to increase your odds of success, and that’s where SEO comes in handy.

It’s becoming much more important for content creators to understand how content is published and discovered on the Internet. In a way, optimizing your content for search is getting easier to understand and easier to integrate into the whole content creation process. 

Why would you create content and put it out there and have someone else come in and optimize it later? If you’re doing the content creation and putting it in a CMS or working with a developer to get it published, well why not integrate that stuff as you’re doing that along the way?

It is especially important for small companies, non-profits, and even government and higher education – those people who don’t have huge SEO resources. 

If content professionals can learn a small amount of basic SEO, they’ll get 90% of the way there. All of the other super heavy keyword analysis, back-linking profiles and pattern analysis, that’s what you do when you’ve already gotten 90% there.

Content + SEO Tools

There are quite a few SEO tools that can empower your content creation process and let your team make more informed marketing decisions. My favorites are:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a keyword research tool that relies on Google search data. It extends your search query and lets you discover what your competitors are ranking for. It is a great content ideation and optimization tool allowing you to see which problems and questions your target audience is struggling with.

2. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is a semantic research tool that takes your target queries and imports search snippets that come for it. Then it analyzes the text extract related concepts and entities letting you discover more topics and angles to cover.

Text Optimizer is a great tool to create lead magnets because it drives long-form in-depth content creation that tackles multiple angles within your chosen topic.

3. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics allows you to identify the most successful content to help you use the data to better understand your audience and focus on what works.

4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo includes lots of tools including content analysis and backlink research. The whole toolset focuses on content signals and authorship making it a great fit for content creators and media publishers.

5. Rank Tracker

With Rank Tracker, you can generate a ton of keyword ideas for your content, create keyword groups for landing pages, and set up rank monitoring for your and your competitors’ websites.

Bottom Line: Content Strategists Must not be Afraid of SEO

Fundamentally, content marketing is all about collaboration. Your content marketing should rely on SEO for ideation strategy and data but it also needs to be unique and creative. Content and SEO teams are both only as strong as their weakest links. The things you publish need to be found organically to break through today’s cacophony of content. Search, content, social, technology, UX and analytics all have to be working in perfect harmony, and so does your team. 

• If there is organization silos, your content will suffer.
• If you have inefficient workflows, your content will suffer.
• And if people don’t believe in your mission and values, your content will suffer.

Strong individuals build great teams. Great teams build great companies. SEO and content should work together to drive a successful digital marketing strategy.

The post Why SEO and Copywriting Go Hand in Hand appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

SEO is vital for any business, but how exactly can businesses use it to drive growth?

Search traffic is historically the best web traffic you can hope for.

Google has been the single most powerful traffic driver for ages, and while its power has been slowly declining of the years, no other traffic channel has come close to organic traffic:

Here’s how SEO can help your business in 2022:

Understand Your Customers Better

One of the immediate benefits of starting an SEO strategy is an ability to better understand (and relate to) people’s journeys around the web.

What is your target audience struggling with? What kind of questions are they asking? What drives their purchasing decisions?

A well-defined keyword research strategy can answer all those questions and enlighten your whole team.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools to perform keyword research because it offers so much useful data including, common modifiers, popular questions, SERP features and more:

You can also run your (or your competitor’s) domain through the tool to see your current positions in Google.

This can give you a more holistic understanding of your keyword rankings, and tell you how people are finding your business (or your competitor’s business) across multiple platforms.

Build More Detailed Buyers’ Personas

Customer personas (also referred to as customer avatar) are people you make up to describe your ideal customers.

Personas make digital marketing more streamlines and understandable by making your buyers easier to relate to. 

When creating a persona, you assign some human traits and features, like gender, income, occupation, etc.

Personas also help you create a customer-centric business model, the only business model that will make your business successful in 2022 and beyond.

To build a persona, you need some kind of data, and that’s where SEO-driven web analytics somes very much in handy. Google Analytics comes with detailed demographics data that will turn very useful for persona creation:

As a business owner, you are, of course, prioritizing your customers. Thus, their feedback is important for you to improve your product or service. In order to learn from your visitors, install Google Analytics tool that collects feedback so that you can analyze it and listen to your customers in order to make your website better. 

No matter how many professionals work on your website, visitors’ feedback is the most qualitative measure of your success. Using conversational forms on your site will help you collect even more data for your SEO campaigns and create more detailed personas.

Take Control of Your Buyers’ Journeys

Buying journeys have become more complicated over the years. Equipped with diverse devices and tools, a consumer may start their journey on one device and continue on a different one. 

They are likely to turn to Google multiple times throughout that fragmented journey, and if your business shows up for multiple queries in multiple sections, you are more likely to win that customer:

A well set-up SEO strategy is targeting more than just organic results. It aims at optimizing the whole SERP (search engine result page):

Take a look at all those sections:

Most of them provide businesses with additional opportunities to get found and engaged with. For example, ranking in the Google Video Carousel can help you with conversions as videos present products and services in an accessible way. Nowadays, editing videos can be done with an online video editor and a simple keyword research and video page optimization can help you bring it among the top SERPs.

A critical cog in the wheel of customer relationships is how well you integrate the online-offline experience of the customer. Every interaction your customer has with your brand doesn’t result in a sale. Neither does every Google search they do. However, engagement is a virtual cycle — more brand awareness means more branded searches and more branded searches mean better visibility, rankings, and ultimately, clicks.

So the best thing for you to do would be to understand (and match) customers’ “intent” at every interaction. Again, this requires alignment between your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Using the right CRM software, you can consolidate the results of your SEO, email marketing and lead generation campaigns, create your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, and funnel back the insights into your content creation process to target them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Identify Your Promoters

If you are into SEO, you sure know your backlinks. But backlinks are not just about higher rankings. Knowing who links to you helps you build stronger niche relationships!

Ahrefs is a great tool for understanding your website’s structure and its backlink portfolio. Essentially, your website’s backlink portfolio is all the websites that have linked from their site back to yours. 

Another great tool is Buzzsumo that allows you to see exactly who is linking to you, and even the author who was found on that page. You can see what content on your website is the most popular, which is especially useful if you incorporate a blog into your website.

You can also set up an alert to receive an email once anyone is linking to your site. This is a great relationship building tactic: Once anyone links to you, reach out to thank, follow and become a friend!

Control Online Context and Sentiment Better

Finally, being there, paying attention to what people see when searching and trying to optimize for that will empower your business with ways to control what people see when searching for your brand or your important queries.

Imagine your current or future customer typing your brand name in Google’s search box. What are they going to see there? How will that impact their buying journey?

Whether you are there or not, your current and potential customers are searching for you and your brand. The difference is, when you are there watching, you can make your business better and make sure you provide the best solutions to their answers.

Conclusion

Of course, SEO offers many more ways to help your business in 2022, including an ability to position your brand as a knowledge hub by driving your content creation decision. 

On top of that, SEO allows you to create the most consistent traffic channel out there. Organic traffic is one of the most valuable traffic-driving channels out there thanks to matching intent (users actually search for answers and solutions, so they are more likely to engage with your site if you give them those answers and solutions).

Customers expect brands to run websites where they can read more about a product or a service, get useful tips from your brand, or find FAQ sections to save time. If you’re about to set up your business, think about ‘budget’ ways to launch a user-friendly website as it helps to grow your business.

The best advice is to do some research, find the tools that work best for you, and never underestimate the value SEO offers for the success of your business.

The post How Can SEO Help Your Business in 2022? appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of digital marketing.

SEO helps with brand discoverability. When done right, SEO can create the most consistent and by far the highest-quality traffic source which doesn’t require on-going maintenance.

Yet, SEO is usually the most isolated part of the marketing. Whether it is an in-house team or a third-party service that’s delivering your SEO campaigns, it usually exists on its own without really communicating goals, progress, or results to the whole company.

This creates silos that can lead to poor results and even reputation crises.

How does SEO work in digital marketing and how can a business make it work better?

What is SEO?

SEO is a collection of tactics (content, technical, link building, even website security and usability) that ensures that your website is easy to understand for search engines.

Basically, it ensures a machine knows that your page will be easy to find to a human being who is looking to solve a related problem.

Search engine traffic is one of the highest-quality traffic for many reasons:

• Unlike PPC (paid) traffic, it doesn’t require an ongoing investment to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic,  it doesn’t require an ongoing work to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic, you are not interrupting people’s browsing. Instead you give them what they were actually searching for.

In other words, it is consistent and it converts well. No other digital marketing tactic beats that.

Apart from driving direct traffic, search engine optimization helps build brand awareness by increasing your brand’s organic findability.

Keep Your Whole Team Aware of Why SEO is Important

The great thing about today is that everyone understands the value of ranking high on Google! Sadly, however, many folks only know that they “need SEO” without having really understood what that means. 

SEO these days is too hard for a digital marketer to do alone. Many SEOs find themselves in situations where an executive will simply come down and go “Why are we not ranking well for ‘dingwobble’?” 

Keep working hard with teams for them to understand how they contribute to the SEO process:

• Product Marketers who are responsible for the business, personas and messaging understand that SEO is critical to driving the bottom line revenue numbers they are looking at. Part of the persona developing process should be the development of the “digital persona” – what websites and search terms are these people looking for? This helps the product marketer when it comes time to develop messaging, as that is going to be critical for developing the content, so the right search terms better be there!
• Field Marketers responsible for the campaigns need to know how SEO fits within their campaign, how it in fact is core to our demand generation, and how to make sure to keep the campaigns integrated.
• Marketing Communications is creating the content, so SEO should very well be top of mind for them, as the content itself will be critical in impacting how successful SEO will be.
• But that’s not all! Often, other groups are creating content (Press Releases, Blog Posts, Presentations, etc.) that also end up on the web and impact SEO. Whether it’s Corporate Communications, Investor Relations or even Legal teams, working with them is critical.
• IT manages the infrastructure and can be very critical to the technical aspects of SEO.
• Sales and customer support teams are at the forefront of marketing talking to your future and current customers, so they need to be involved in the SEO strategy. Creating relevant content goes beyond keywords. It needs to address real problems and answer actual people’s questions, and your client-facing teams will be your best source of inspiration here.  
• Executives also care! While they can’t often influence the day-to-day of SEO, they will care a lot about the bottom line, to which SEO contributes.

Educating all of these people about SEO helps empower them, as well as position yourself, the SEO, as the subject matter expert who is not just someone back-office who gives very little visibility into the black box of SEO, but someone who is actively educating and contributing to the organization’s success.

Review and discuss common KPIs early and often to make sure everyone knows what victory looks like to the team.

Additionally, SEO should be a solid part of any project launch as it impacts every stage of product positioning. From choosing a business name to choosing a website builder, your initial efforts should be driven by SEO best practices.

What is the key to SEO success in a constantly changing environment?

As a practitioner of SEO, I believe that you need to look to ensure you are looking at both developing yourself in both depth and breadth of knowledge. A key danger in the name of being informed or being a part of the SEO community is spending all your time debating tactics and practices rather than testing them. 

Additionally, SEOs as with all employees need to look outside their field to stretch and learn how to be more well rounded. This could mean learning to code, or educating yourself in some other area of the business you work for.  This will expose you to ideas others may not have.

As a manager of people, success is really about diversity of expertise. Who you hire and the kind of people you hire will be far more valuable than much of what people invest in with regards to SEO programs. You have to have people who can roll with the punches and develop a skill for self-management and personal growth. 

Finally, I think knowing what your real goals are in having an SEO program are the key to long term success. The reality is you may get more traffic, but if that traffic is not from qualified leads and generates real revenue then the benefit may be very little. Having well defined goals and metrics will also help you avoid chasing algorithm changes and focus on the big picture.

Conclusion

SEO is the most essential long-term digital marketing strategy but to make it really effective, you need a knowledge team that is well-integrated into the company’s life. Good luck!

The post Why SEO Still Matters for Your Entire Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Do you want to increase your website’s rankings? SEO is a powerful way to do this. On page SEO refers to the content on your website, and it can take time and patience to get it right. In this blog post, we will go over three tips for optimizing SEO on your website so that you can rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP).

These tips are the foundational pieces that I have used for my business and clients that flat out get results.

SILOing Your Content

A big part of search engine optimization is creating content. One mistake people make is not structuring that content properly so it is easily followed. The first thing you need to know is how to structure the content so when someone comes to the site they can easily navigate and find the content they are looking for.

The best way to do this is through SILOing your content.

What is SILOing you ask?

SILOing stands for “siloing information.” It’s the process of organizing website content in a hierarchical manner. On each page, you have to provide links that lead users down a hierarchy, or order, of topics or subtopics.

I like to draw it out on a white board and make it look like an organizational chart.

Here is an example of what a hiearchy would look like:

The main topic of focus for the entire website is right at the top. Below the main topic, start creating subtopics. I like to keep the subtopics to 5 or less in the beginning. Then, underneath each subtopic, start writing all the potential things you can write about on that particular topic.

If you have a hard time  coming up with things to write about, go to websites like answerthepublic.com or quora.com and search the subtopic. Then just write down all the questions that come up and answer them.

How long should each article or piece of content be for SEO?

There are many answers to this question depending on where you focus. From our experience with clients, we have found that top-performing content is at least 1200 words and that content should not be less than 800 words. If content is under 800 words, it typically performs poorly in rankings.

Now with SILOing, you can use multiple pieces of content in a “series” like format to get the word count up.

The idea behind having this much content is that you want to build authority on the topic.

Google hasn’t really come out and said 800 – 1200 words is the mark, but if you can easily write 1200 words on a topic it shows that you know a little of what you are talking about, Google likes that.

As for keywords and getting all that in there. Each piece of content should be themed towards a question or single topic that falls under that sub topic. This makes it really easy for keyword strategy.

What I tell my clients is to not worry about making sure the right keywords are in the right place. I tell them to focus more on providing high quality content that is easily consumable. The keywords will appear where they need to.

You want your content to be organic, authentic, and easy to read and understand. The more you focus on this, the better your content will be and the higher it will rank.

As you build out your SILO visually, it’ll be easier to also connect the dots across categories where you can provide internal links for additional content to better strengthen your content.

Once you have content written the next thing you should put focus on is Rich Data snippets, or Schema Markup.

Schema Markup

What is schema markup?

Schema markup is a way to structure your content for search engines. On the internet, there are different types of data that websites can use, and it’s important to be able to “mark them up” so that they’re easily understood by search engine crawlers.

There are two main things you need schema markup for – reviews & people or organizations.

Of course there are other areas such as videos, FAQ’s, breadcrumbs, etc.

The type of site you have will dictate how in depth you want to go with the schema or structured data snippets.

The way Google likes to see it is in the JSON format.

Now I know what you are saying…”that sounds super techie and I don’t want to do it.”

I’m here to tell you…yes it is techie and you must do it!

Luckily there are a ton of plugins and websites that will write this for you and all you have to do is give the information.

The website I like to use and have clients use is https://technicalseo.com/tools/. 

This website has a bunch of other tools to help with your robots file, sitemap and htaccess file.So you can leave the real techie stuff to the software. All you need to worry about is copy and pasting it into the right place.

The really cool thing about schema is not a lot of websites do it. If you are in a niche, especially a local niche (ie. HVAC, Hotel, dentist, massage therapist, etc.) you will easily beat out your competition just by adding schema to your site.

Just remember, Google will always serve you when you give them as much information as possible in their preferred format. In many cases, this will be the sole reason you outrank the competition.

There are many other factors in getting high rankings for your website, but having well-written structured data is one of the big factors that Google looks at.

Now that we have awesome content that is structured with a SILO, and the site is properly marked up with Schema, we must continue with providing that great user experience.

The best way we go about doing that is making sure the site loads fast.

Website Loading Speed

One of the main things that affects website ranking is how fast the site loads.

Google has said that they are using page speed as a ranking factor.

There are many things you can do to increase your website’s loading time, such as optimizing images, compressing files, and caching static content.

Using sites such as GTMetrix will give you an awesome idea on where you can get started with your speed optimization and what is going to make the biggest impact right away.

Once you have made the adjustments, I always cross reference through Google’s PageSpeed tool to make sure I am doing the right things and getting the desired results.

Another thing you can do is use a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN is a service that distributes your website’s files across multiple servers located around the world. This speeds up the loading time by serving the files from the closest server to the visitor.

There are many different CDNs available, such as CloudFlare and MaxCDN. I like to use CloudFlare because it’s free and easy to set up.

One Last Recommendation

This bonus tip is to make sure you have a Google Search Console, formerly known as webmaster tools, account. You can use this to check your crawl rate and see if there are any errors you need to fix on the site. On top of that, it’s great for getting feedback from Google about how they view your website.

Just by doing these few things, you can greatly improve your website’s loading time and boost your SEO rankings.

SEO is not a one time fix and it’s an on-going process. You must always be working to improve your website’s ranking. These are just a few of the things you can do to get started.

EJ Saunders

EJ has been in the digital marketing world since 2008 and founded his company Blaze Digital Solutions in March of 2020. Over the years he has worked with a variety of different businesses and is personally responsible for generating well over $10 million in sales with digital ads and SEO. 
EJ and his team at Blaze Digital act as a bolt on marketing team and help their clients businesses scale. His mission is to help at least 10 businesses generate $10 million annually in the next 10 years.  

• LinkedIn
• Link

The post 3 Tips to Catapult Your SEO Results in 2022 appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Page two of Google is no man’s land.

It’s like you bought a ticket to Fiji and ended up at your hometown beach or lake. Unless your hometown is Fiji…this wasn’t the plan.

In no man’s land, you’re not getting traffic. You’re not getting conversions. And you’re not feeling good about it.

If putting your money into an SEO strategy feels equivalent to setting it on fire, we’re here to help you. With the rise in online content consumption, SEO needs to be making you money.

Not taking away from your profits. 

Here are 5 reasons your current SEO strategy is failing.

#1: You’re Not Using Content Clusters

The content cluster strategy has become extremely popular over the years. Aja Frost, Head of Content at Hubspot, workshopped the strategy for DigitalMarketer Lab members showing how content clusters helped Hubspot rank for more keywords.

Without content clusters, your SEO strategy might fall flat. These clusters bundle content together based on a particular topic. For example, this article is part of a content cluster for the topic SEO. We have a pillar post accompanying 1,000-1,500 word articles that all link to that main post.

The goal is for these posts to drive viewers to our pillar post, which will then have lots of CTAs for our offer. This strategy helps you rank for more keywords (because you have more content for each keyword) while showing search engines that your website visitors love your stuff. When you read the entirety of this article, click on our pillar post and read all the way through that…search engines realize you really like our stuff.

That helps us rank for these keywords and boosts our posts in the rankings.

Try writing pillar posts with supporting “smaller” articles on the same topic that all link to that pillar post. Your keyword ranking should increase and you should see your articles creep up to Page 1 (fingers crossed!).

#2: You’re Not Investing in Your Content

People used to get away with a lot when it came to content. They could post subpar articles and find their way to the top of Page 1. But now that’s getting harder. And we like it! Bad content shouldn’t be ranking because it’s not giving search engine users a good experience. Search engines only have one goal…find the answer to someone’s question. Bad content doesn’t answer that question and leaves the reader looking for more.

That’s where high bounce rates come in and the search engines deem your content as “unworthy” of Page 1. 

5 million WordPress blogs were posted *every day* in Q1 of 2021. If you think you can get away with subpar content—and then wonder why your SEO strategy is failing—it’s time to do some reflecting.

You’ll get what you put into your SEO strategy. 

Invest in your content so that people keep reading it. When they keep reading, it tells the search engines that other people (with the same search query) would like to read this too.

#3: You’re Using a Generalized CTA

If you’re getting traffic, but you’re not getting conversions from your SEO strategy—we can fix it. The good news is you’re doing a great job of ranking for your keywords. You’ve come really far and the rest is a (semi) easy fix.

What we need to do is take a look at your call-to-action:

• Is it too general vs. specific to the question that led them to this article?
• Is it asking people to buy a product unrelated to the article they’re reading?
• Have you tested different offers?

Start to test your CTAs to figure out what’s going wrong with them. Use Harry Dry’s strategy of call-to-values in place of call-to-actions to make sure you’re focused on the reader (not your personal gain from the conversion):

#4: You Can’t See the Results Yet

Kids and SEO strategies are great tests of patience. When it comes to kids, we suggest deep breaths. When it comes to SEO, we suggest weekly meetings and deep breaths. Your SEO strategy might feel expensive while it’s not bringing in an ROI, but you have to remember—this is a long-term strategy.

This isn’t a paid ads strategy that gets turned on and optimized in a few days. SEO takes time. Search engines need to learn what question your content answers and they’ll do that best when a bunch of people have read through it (see below). 

If you’re not seeing results within a few weeks of launching your SEO strategy…wait. Don’t pull the parachute and funnel your money into a proven marketing channel. If you’ve wanted to get your SEO off the ground the time to stop IS NOT NOW.

Let your SEO strategy run for at least a few months to make sure it has time to work.

If it really doesn’t work after then, take another look through these 5 reasons your strategy is failing to see what else could be going wrong.

#5: You’re Not Using Your Other Platforms to Get Traction

When you run paid ads for the first time, the platform (ex. Facebook) will suggest that you give them a test period. During these 7 days, they need about $50 so their algorithm can figure out who your audience is. They need to see who:

• Engages with your posts
• Clicks to your profile
• Explores your website

This tells the platform who is the best fit to show this paid ad to. You can think of SEO in a similar way. If you’re able to drive traffic to your articles on your own, you’re helping the algorithm figure out who is the best fit for your search results. 

Not only that, but you’re also boosting your articles in search rankings because search engines are noticing that people love your content.

If you have an audience (email list, social media, anything!)—promote your content to them.

This will only help your SEO strategy (and can be done for free most of the time).

Don’t End Up in No Man’s Land

SEO is a tricky part of marketing. It’s the part that isn’t always entirely clear because platforms, like Google, don’t seem to really know how things get ranked. As machine learning and algorithms took over the ranking process, we have to play into their rules to make sure that our content gets prioritized.

And their number one rule is to give their users a great experience. That comes directly from showing them great content.

Guess who’s content that could be?

If your SEO strategy is failing, don’t give up until you’ve:

1. Tried the content cluster strategy
2. Properly invested in making your content high-quality
3. Tested different CTAs (and turned them into CTVs)
4. Given it at least a few months to show an ROI
5. Promoted your content across your other marketing channels

SEO can change your business. Make sure to give it a fair shot before you call it quits.

The post 5 Reasons Your Current SEO Strategy is Failing appeared first on DigitalMarketer.