Five Smart SEO Strategies You May Be Missing

If you are like most marketers, you likely have spent considerable time, money and effort in SEO optimization among the three major search engines. Hopefully, your efforts are paying off, and you are seeing increasing relevant traffic to your website. If you are not getting the results you had hoped for, however, either you’ve set expectations too high, your search strategy is not optimized, or you may be missing some opportunities to improve your search rankings that you may not be aware of. Below are five smart strategies that Nowspeed provides our clients that you should consider to take your SEO efforts to the next level:

1. Uncover your competitors’ keywords.

Increasingly, as part of an initial SEO engagement with our clients, we are conducting a competitive keyword audit in addition to identifying potential keywords through in-house brainstorming techniques. While a keyword brainstorm is likely the place where you will find most of your relevant keywords, a competitive keyword audit will augment the list and perhaps uncover keyword opportunities you hadn’t yet considered. It also gives you a better understanding of how your competition is using SEO, so that you can devise a more knowledgeable strategy.

2. Reevaluate keywords regularly.

Keywords, like business models, change over time. This is especially true of a company who is offering a relatively new technology solution, or a solution to a problem that can be solved in a variety of ways. You may be surprised to find that some terms that were not searched on just six months ago are being searched on now. Likely, your top 8 will remain the same, if they were strategically chosen; however, you should continuously measure the effectiveness of your keywords. In addition, always leave room for emerging or new keywords that relate to perhaps an expanded product offering, a new business need that has emerged, or a change in priorities.

3. Nurture your keywords.

A lot of SEO efforts, unfortunately, start off with a lot of initiative, then become “frozen in time.” Keywords are chosen, pages are optimized, links are established, then clients tend to sit back and watch for the results to roll in. The reality is that your SEO strategy needs to be constantly nurtured, or it will quickly become ineffective. You need to nurture your keywords through new content, link development, SEO-optimized press release submissions, blog entries and more.

4. Continuously create keyword-rich content.

Your organic ranking on Google is partially based on quality and relevance of the content on your web site. As such, you should always be adding fresh, relevant articles, white papers, case studies, press releases, web content and blog entries to your site based on your top keywords. The best way to do this is create a content editorial calendar based around your hottest keywords, then get writing.

5. Start a social media strategy.

Wikipedia, a popular social media wiki (and sometimes a competitor for your keyword) describes social media as this: “Participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission, normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become "popular." Examples of popular social media include blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, IM, social networks such as LinkedIn or FaceBook and video outlets such as YouTube. Social Media Optmization involves trying to get your social media content more widely distributed through on-page voting, using tools like Digg or Reddit. Off-page social media marketing can include involvement in a blog, submission of a video via YouTube, or participation in other relevant social media networks. Most companies are in the beginning stages of trying to figure out how social media fits into their traditional marketing and SEO efforts. The fact is, that social media is becoming more and more relevant to SEO efforts, as evidenced with Wikipedia’s high organic rankings.

These five strategies are really just the tip of the iceberg, but perhaps have given you some new ideas in optimizing your already existing SEO strategy.

Have any comments or suggestions regarding this topic? We’d love to hear them! 

Email your comments to info@nowspeed.com.