I’ve worked with and spoken to many small businesses over my years in SEO. One of the most common concerns I’ve heard is that they can’t possibly scale their SEO efforts. It’s a daunting task — how can you possibly scale up to compete with much larger businesses?
The good news is that it’s possible. I’ve seen it time and time again. These nine best practices will help you build a solid foundation for your SEO efforts and keep growing from there.
1. Create a content strategy
A content strategy is a plan for consistently creating and publishing content to your website. This can include blog posts, long-form guides, videos, podcasts, and more.
Your content strategy should be designed to help you achieve your business goals. For example, if your goal is to generate leads, your content strategy should be focused on creating content that will attract your target customers and get them to sign up for your email list.
If your goal, on the other hand, is to drive sales, your content strategy should be focused on creating content that will attract your target customers and get them to make a purchase.
In other words, your content strategy should be designed to help you achieve your business goals.
When creating a content strategy, it’s important to consider the following:
• Who is your target audience?
• What are the problems, questions, and challenges they have that you can help them with?
• What type of content do they prefer?
• What are the best channels to promote your content to reach your target audience?
• What is the competition doing?
• How will you measure success?
To get started, you can use a tool like HubSpot’s Website Grader to see how your website is doing and what you can do to improve it.
2. Optimize your existing content
It’s the age-old saying: “Work smarter, not harder.” This couldn’t be more true when it comes to growing your website’s organic traffic.
SEO is all about creating content that provides value to your audience. But, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create new content. Instead, focus on optimizing the content you already have.
Optimizing your existing content is one of the most effective ways to scale your organic traffic. By doing so, you can improve your website’s visibility in search engine results, drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads and sales.
In this section, we’ll cover three key ways you can optimize your existing content to improve your website’s SEO.
1. Update old content
Over time, your content may become outdated or irrelevant. If that’s the case, you should update it.
Before you start updating your old content, take some time to review your website’s analytics and identify which pieces of content are performing well and which ones aren’t. This will help you prioritize which content you should update first.
When updating old content, focus on the following:
• Make sure the information is up to date and accurate.
• Improve the readability of the content.
• Add new images, videos or other multimedia elements.
• Optimize the content for new keywords.
By updating your old content, you can improve its relevance, quality and search engine rankings.
2. Repurpose content
Another effective way to optimize your existing content is to repurpose it. You can also find e-commerce examples of content repurposing — like turning blog posts into videos — to expand your reach.
Repurposing content is the process of taking an existing piece of content and presenting it in a new format. For example, you could turn a blog post into a video, infographic or SlideShare presentation.
Repurposing content allows you to reach new audiences, improve your website’s SEO and drive more traffic to your website. It also helps you save time and resources, since you’re not starting from scratch.
When repurposing content, be sure to optimize the new piece of content for SEO. This includes adding relevant keywords, meta tags and descriptions.
3. Consolidate content
If you have multiple pieces of content on the same topic, consider consolidating them into a single, comprehensive piece of content.
Consolidating content is the process of taking multiple pieces of content on the same topic and combining them into a single, more comprehensive piece of content. This helps you avoid keyword cannibalization and improve your website’s SEO.
Before you start consolidating content, take some time to review your website’s analytics and identify which pieces of content are ranking well and which ones aren’t. This will help you determine which content you should consolidate.
When consolidating content, be sure to do the following:
• Choose a single, primary piece of content to consolidate the other pieces into.
• Update the primary piece of content to include the information from the other pieces.
• Add 301 redirects from the old pieces of content to the new, consolidated piece.
By consolidating content, you can improve the relevance, quality and search engine rankings of your website’s content.
3. Conduct a backlink analysis
When you’re looking to improve your site’s SEO, it’s not enough to just look at the content and keywords. You also need to consider your backlink profile.
A backlink profile is a list of all the websites that link to your website. If you have a lot of high-quality, relevant websites linking to your content, this is a good signal to search engines that your content is also high-quality and relevant.
If you have a lot of low-quality, irrelevant websites linking to your content, this can have a negative impact on your SEO and your site’s ranking.
To improve your backlink profile, you can conduct a backlink analysis to identify which websites are linking to your content. Then, you can reach out to these websites and ask them to remove the link or add a nofollow attribute to the link.
4. Use SEO tools to identify technical issues
Technical issues can really slow down your website’s load times. And that’s not good for your SEO.
Google wants to provide the best user experience possible. So, if your site is slow, Google will be less likely to recommend it.
But how do you know if your website is slow? The answer is simple: use SEO tools.
There are a number of free and paid SEO tools available that can help you identify technical issues that are slowing down your website. You could also use AI SEO tools.
One of the most popular tools is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool will give you a score of your website’s load time and provide suggestions on how to improve it.
Another great tool is GTmetrix. This tool will give you a detailed report on your website’s load time, as well as recommendations on how to improve it.
By identifying and fixing technical issues that are slowing down your website, you can improve your SEO and increase your organic traffic.
5. Conduct keyword research
Keyword research is how you discover what people are searching for and how you can create content that matches their search intent.
It’s also how you discover which keywords to target and which to avoid. For example, you may find that a keyword you want to target is too competitive and unrealistic for your website to rank for.
Or, you may find that a keyword you want to target has a lower search volume than you thought and isn’t worth your time.
There are many keyword research tools you can use to discover new keywords and analyze existing ones. Some of the most popular tools include:
• Google Keyword Planner
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Moz
• KeywordTool.io
• Ubersuggest
When conducting keyword research, it’s important to look at the search volume, keyword difficulty, and competition for each keyword you’re considering targeting.
6. Optimize your website for local search
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website so that you can rank higher in local search results. This is important if you have a brick-and-mortar location or if you provide services to a specific geographic area.
Local SEO is a bit more complex than traditional SEO, but it’s a great way to reach potential customers who are close by. Plus, local search results are often less competitive than traditional search results, so you may be able to rank higher with less effort.
The key to local SEO is to make sure that your website is optimized for your location. This includes adding your city and state to your title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags, as well as including your contact information and a map to your location on your website.
You should also claim and optimize your Google My Business listing, as well as any other local business directories that are relevant to your industry. This will help you to rank higher in local search results and get your business in front of potential customers in your area.
7. Use schema markup to enhance search results
Schema markup is code that you add to your website to help search engines provide more informative and valuable results for users.
Schema markup can be used to provide detailed information about products, services, events, recipes, reviews, and more. Say you run a marketplace for electronics — optimizing your product descriptions and category pages with structured data can greatly boost visibility.
When you use schema markup on your site, your search results will stand out from the competition, which can help increase your click-through rate and drive more organic traffic to your website.
In addition to using schema markup to enhance your search results, you can also use it to provide more detailed information about your products, services, and other content on your website.
This can help you improve your website’s visibility in the search results and drive more organic traffic.
8. Create a mobile-friendly website
In 2019, mobile devices accounted for half of all website traffic worldwide. This trend has only continued to grow.
In 2021, Google rolled out a mobile-first indexing update, which means Google primarily uses the mobile version of your content for ranking and indexing. So, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on a massive chunk of organic traffic.
The easiest way to make sure your website is mobile-friendly is to use a responsive design. This simply means your website will adjust to fit the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. Most website themes are built to be responsive, but it’s always a good idea to double-check.
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your website is up to par. If it’s not, you’ll get a list of things you can do to improve it.
9. Analyze and optimize your content
The key to a successful SEO strategy is to continuously analyze and optimize your content.
You should regularly check your rankings and traffic to see how your content is performing. If you notice that your content is not getting the results you want, you can make changes to improve it.
For example, you might need to update your content with new information or add more keywords. You might also want to consider creating new pieces of content that are more closely aligned with your target keywords.
By analyzing and optimizing your content on a regular basis, you can improve your SEO strategy and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Conclusion
Remember, this isn’t an exhaustive list of potential SEO strategies. But, by implementing the tactics we’ve outlined above, you can boost your website’s search ranking and increase organic traffic, which will improve your bottom line.
