The most important SEO techniques
Top SEO Techniques
The good news is that you don’t have to be a search engine researcher to rank for valuable terms in search results.
We’ll go over proven, repeatable best practices for optimizing websites for search that can help you attract targeted traffic
through research without having to reverse engineer the core competencies of one of the world’s most valuable companies.
If you’re interested in learning more about how search engines work, there are plenty of great resources available,
Now, back to the basics of SEO! Let’s get into the actual SEO tactics and strategies that will help you get more traffic from search engines.
Keyword Research Best Practices:
The first step to truly improving your search engine is to identify what you’re actually optimizing for.
That means identifying the terms that people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.
Sounds simple enough, right? I want my tools company to show up when people search for “tools,” and maybe when they type things like “buy tools.” Step 3!
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are a few key factors to consider when deciding which keywords to target on your site.
Top SEO Techniques
Search Volume: The first factor to consider is how many people (if any) are actually searching for a given keyword. The more people are searching for a keyword, the larger audience you can reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there’s no audience available to find your content through search.
Relevance – If a phrase is frequently searched, that’s great: but what if it’s completely irrelevant to your prospects?
Relevance seems straightforward at first: if you’re selling email marketing automation software for businesses, you don’t want to show up for searches
that have nothing to do with your business, like “pet supplies.”
But what about terms like “email marketing software”? This may seem like a great description of what you do, but if you’re selling to Fortune 100 companies,
most of the traffic to this highly competitive term will be from searchers who have no interest in buying your software (and the people you want to reach
may never buy your expensive, complex solution based on a simple Google search).
Conversely, you might think that a casual keyword like “best enterprise PPC marketing solutions” is completely irrelevant to your business since you’re not selling PPC marketing software.
But if your potential client is a marketing manager or marketing executive, having useful resources for evaluating PPC tools can be a great “first touch”
and a great way to start a relationship with a potential buyer.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO Techniques:
Competition: As with any business opportunity, in SEO you want to think about potential costs and the likelihood of success. For SEOs, this means understanding the relative competition (and ranking potential) for specific terms.
First you need to understand who your potential customers are and what they’re likely to be searching for. If you don’t already understand who your prospects are, thinking about that is a good place to start, both for your business in general but also for SEO.
From there you want to understand:
What kinds of things are they interested in?
What problems do they have?
What kind of language do they use to describe the things they do, the tools they use, etc.?
Who else is buying things (this means your competitors, but it could also mean related spin-offs – for an email marketing company, think other enterprise marketing tools)?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a “starter list” of potential keywords and domains to help you get
additional keyword ideas and establish some search volume and competition metrics.
How to Improve SEO
Take a list of the basic ways your prospects and customers describe what you do, and start plugging them into keyword tools like
Google’s own Keyword Tool or tools like Uber Suggest or WordStream’s Keyword Tool:
Again: This doesn’t have to be just something you look at for competitors. You can look at related tools that sell to the same market for content ideas,
and even look at the major niche publishers that talk about your topic (and that your prospects read) and see what types of keywords those sites are driving traffic to.
In addition, if you have an existing site, you’re likely getting some traffic from search engines already.
If so, you can use some of your own keyword data to help you understand what terms are driving traffic
(and that you might be able to rank a little better for).
Unfortunately, Google has stopped providing much of the information about what people are searching for to analytics providers,
but you can use SEM Rush (or similar tools, like SpyFu) on your own site
to learn what terms you are searching for, their rankings, and estimated search volume.
Google also provides a bit more of this data in the free Google Search Console interface (if you haven’t created an account,
This is a valuable SEO tool for both uncovering search query data and diagnosing many technical SEO issues