When you’re managing a team and developing a large site, understanding where to focus and invest in SEO can become quite confusing.
For example, do you expand your blog to grow long-tail traffic or do you focus on improving ranking for existing keywords? In this article, I want to explain my approach to how I approach the SEO marketing plan for some of my brands.
1) Focus on the Easy Wins First
The easiest thing to do from an SEO point of view is develop content for high volume keywords with little competition. Sometimes you have to ask yourself if that type of traffic will convert for your brand. However, I also think that building brand awareness in front of your target audience is an incentive in itself.
For example, at RightCasino.com we realized there was a huge amount of interest in Dan Bilzerian, however none of our competitors were picking up on this. So we decided to invest a bit of time publishing news, features and infographics about Dan, which ended up doubling our traffic. This was after receiving links from social communities such as Reddit, forums and being re-tweeted by the Dan Bilzerian himself.
We’ve also done interviews with University professors and experts in the gaming industry to help organic links and awareness.
These early forms of marketing helped us to create a platform to build on initially, and required relatively little effort and input on our behalf.
2) Next: What do your Competitors do better?
Keeping an eye on your competitor’s strategy is another important thing for me.
I’m a huge fan of tools such as SEMRush.com, which let you analyze your competitors’ rankings and see where they get their traffic. This includes both SEO and Adwords keyword rankings.
If you’re stuck for inspiration on how to develop more content, products or sections for your site then I highly recommend plugging your competitors’ URLs into SEMRush and seeing if anything stands out. There might be something obvious that you missed out on.
When I consulted for Investoo.com (an online trading school) for example, I realized some of their biggest competitors such as Tradimo were generating a huge amount of traffic from their encyclopedia of trading terms. In many cases they were ranking no.1 and no.2 for individual terms that were bringing them thousands of extra visitors per month.
3) Macro vs. Micro SEO Keyword targeting
Deciding whether to pursue individual keyword rankings or generate more long tail traffic is where a lot of people get unstuck in my opinion. It’s the macro vs. micro argument about SEO rankings.
I definitely think if there are keywords within your grasp that can fund further expansion then you should go for them. At the end of the day there are individual keywords can earn you $10,000s per month just for being on page one. If you’re already ranking page 2 or even 3 for lucrative keywords than it probably won’t require too much effort to get to page 1.
However, I would also want to limit my exposure to this type of targeted approach for two reasons: 1) because it is high risk, high reward and 2) it could take longer than expected to achieve results.
Overall, you want to balance keyword targeting with a consistent increase in your blog’s organic traffic. It then just comes down to how much time or resources you can dedicate to individual keyword targeting.
4) Use the Power of PR, Industry Events and Communication to Help Launch Your Brand
When you launch a new product or service, I think you’re missing a huge trick by not investing in a professional press release service or spending a week doing outreach.
There are some great guides on performing outreach here, however if you’re feel lazy then I recommending contacting some of the biggest news sites in your industry. The advantage of doing this is that if one of the major news sites picks up your story then the chances are that smaller news sites and blogs will republish it.
In order to get your brand out there, it also helps to submit yourself for industry awards or speak at industry events. For example, last year I gave a keynote presentation at the LAC (London Affiliate Conference) on behalf of our brand. We published the presentation on our website and subsequently received a number links and social shares to it. It also put us on the map so to speak and gave us greater credibility for our outreach campaigns and brand.
5) Technical SEO, Coding and Improving Your UX
Improving your page speed, coding, user navigation and experience for your mobile users has become incredibly important in SEO.
This means optimizing all of your images for the web, using CSS background images where possible, and probably upgrading your hosting to a faster system. Even removing things such as Facebook comments and Like Boxes have been proven to significantly reduce your load speed.
Also remember that mobile users have less patience than desktop users, which means you need to focus more on improving your mobile user experience. Google even released a penalty last year that affected slow-loading mobile sites back in 2013.
6) Translating your Content: Is it Time to Go International?
Depending on the nature of your business, language translation is another major aspect I look at to generate growth in foreign markets.
For example, translating a site into Spanish opens the doors to Spain and large parts of South America. Similarly, translating into French gives you access to both the French and Canadian markets. Nick Pateman has written an excellent guide to translating your site for International SEO here.
When choosing which sections of my site to translate, I try to focus on evergreen content that won’t require a lot of changes going forward. After all, making changes to translated content without a multilingual person on your team can be quite tiresome. I also recommend the WPL.org plugin for wordpress users.
7) Promote User-Generated Content (UGC)
There’s nothing Google likes more than sites with real customer reviews, social engagement and ratings. Websites with communities also benefit from increased interaction on their site, which means fresher content, longer time-on-site and a better Panda score.
User Generated Content is also an extremely cost effective way to generate more content on your site New financial comparison websites such as Invezz.com have even paid users with £10 of Amazon vouchers to leave reviews on their site.
As long as your niche lends itself to social interaction, you should encourage users to register on your site, leave reviews and build a platform for them to communicate with each other. This also helps you to consolidate your brand’s share of the industry and build a higher benchmark for new competition.