Working in search engine optimization can be a lot of fun, and also a lot of work. It’s very similar to growing plants. You decide where you want your plants to grow, you plant them, water them, then eventually you have a full garden starting to bear fruit.
SEO is similar in many ways. You first decide what you want to rank for in Google, you then target specific keywords in your content, make sure you’re consistent with technical SEO, and before long you’ll start to see your content climbing in Google rankings.
We’ve been in the SEO industry for quite some time now, so we decided to share some things we’ve learned over the years that can help make your SEO strategy go a lot smoother.
SEO Is Always Changing
When most marketers began doing SEO it was a much simpler route to success. You would write your content, target a few keywords in headlines, and then submit the pages to Google to start ranking.
Nowadays, it’s gotten a lot more competitive and algorithms decide largely who gets ranked where. You also have to consider more aspects of your content when trying to improve your rank. You have to consider personalization, location, RankBrain, and machine learning to really start being competitive in your SEO strategy.
We also now have access to so many SEO tools. We can track how keywords are doing, how many people are visiting our page, what they’re doing on page, etc. But with more visibility comes more chances for optimization and more competition. The better you keep up with what’s new, the better you can keep up with your competitors.
Learn As Much Technical SEO As Possible
Knowing and understanding the basics of SEO is great and will get you pretty far, but fully understanding the technical part of SEO can help you out tremendously. If you can work on both front-end and back-end of websites – and understand what you’re doing – you can make work easier for you, your dev team, and make your skillset more attractive for future SEO employers.
SEO Takes Management
A lot of SEO professionals and first time marketers think that SEO is just a set it and forget it strategy. However SEO takes consistent management and refinement. You want to make sure that you’re regularly reviewing the success of your keywords, your overall strategy, and how you’re ranking. By doing this you can identify areas of improvement for your website and content that can help increase your rankings and lead to more relevant users on your website.
Tools like Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and SEMRush are great ways to keep track of your important metrics and get alerts for how you can improve your website’s technical SEO score. These should be in every SEO professionals repertoire.
There Is No One Size Fits All Approach to SEO
There is a bit of an art to making SEO work for you. There is no template or formula that leads to success every time. You have to focus on a few things:
– Know what your users are searching for. By knowing what they’re actively searching in Google you can start to target those searches and improve your visibility.
– Understand your competitors. Take a look at what they’re doing. If you notice they’re having more success than you doing something else, don’t be afraid to incorporate what’s working for them into your strategy.
– Focus on what matters. Title tags, meta descriptions, structured snippets, anything that can help you to improve your comprehensive SEO strategy will be the key to helping you have success in this field.
The Takeaway
The key takeaway is that SEO will only take you as far as you’re willing to go. The more you learn about SEO, the easier the process will become and the quicker your pages will begin to rank. Also, be aware of how your content is performing, what competitors are doing, and don’t be scared to try new strategies and ideas. Good luck!