3 Important Tactics to Include In Your SEO Strategy

There are a couple of things that Google really cares about when it comes to deciding how your website pages get ranked in search results.

1. Overall Traffic
2. Amount of time spent on the page itself

(NOTE: I said “page,” not the overall website.)

3. Page authority.

So the foundation of any SEO strategy should focus on driving traffic (1) to website pages that have a reason for people to stick around (2) so that you become an authority (3).

How do you do this?

By including these 3 tactics in your SEO strategy:

Tactic 1: Get backlinks to your site

This is essentially the popular kid at school saying, “This new kid is cool enough to hang out with us.”

If their domain authority (i.e. score of overall domain in ranking, not just a page) is higher than yours, the backlink serves as the popular kid giving you an endorsement as somebody worth knowing. It does not make YOU the new popular kid (yet), but it makes people start paying attention.

That is the same case with Google. A website that ranks higher than yours saying that your website is worth linking theirs to will give you a boost.

So how do you get backlinks?

Work on your PR strategy. Pitch your thoughts to reporters. Reply to queries via HARO, Qwoted, an individual journalists’ Substack email lists.

(Or…if you are a baller service provider you can hire me to do it all for you.)

The more you can get your name in print the better.

Each time your name is printed, be sure they have your company name, with a link to your site, as the reference point.

Example:

“[INSERT AMAZING QUOTE],” said Channing Muller, Principal of DCM Communications.

Not every media publication will allow for links, but is ALWAYS worth asking.

Tactic 2: Create quality content & present it in an easily digestible manner

This is where videos, blog articles, webinars, pdf downloads, quizzes, etc come into play. Each one of these should be a way of establishing your company as an authority on the subject it’s talking about. (As this article establishes me as an authority on SEO.)

Each one of your pieces of content will have its own page, thereby creating the foundation for the page authority (3) mentioned above.

But even if you have all the best ideas in the world, there are still two other things you need:

→ Traffic going to the page
→ An aesthetically pleasing layout

Writing the blog post and publishing it isn’t enough. It has to be laid out in a fashion that is easy for people to skim, scroll, and read.

Why? Because if it is hard to read across various devices or someone lands there and all they see is a big chunk of text, they will navigate away or “bounce” as search engines call it.

This is why website design matters so much for SEO. You want to have the right words on the page to establish it as an authority on the subject it is talking about, but it also needs to have short, easy to read paragraphs with subheadings, formatting and graphics included.

All of these things make it easier for someone to read the content you have written, which helps establish you AS the authority. If it’s easy to read, it will also keep them on the page longer checking off item 2 in our list above.

Tact 3: Tell people you created the content!

Y’all, it is not enough to “build it and they will come” when talking about content marketing. You HAVE to actually tell people it’s there.

That initial campaign including an email to your list, plus multiple social media posts about the topic can all be the first boost of traffic to the page.

The more traffic YOU can drive to a page, the faster search engines will start to take notice and move the page up the rankings organically.

Above all, remember that SEO is a long game. It’s the organic way of boosting your website traffic. Don’t get discouraged if your homepage isn’t on the first page of results for the keywords you want to be ranked for.

That would be like showing up at a new school and expecting to be the BMOC (big man on campus) on Day One.

It’s unrealistic and setting yourself up for disappointment.

Instead, keep creating content that is valuable, present it in a way that’s easy to scroll and digest, and above all:

Keep telling people about it!

Remember: If you build it and you tell them about it, they will come.