In this blog I’ll try to walk you through an entire step-by-step SEO strategy in order to gain more engagement which in a not so distant future is bound to provide more leads and hence make way for higher business conversions. In fact, this is the exact strategy that market leaders use to rank higher in search engines like Google.
Digital marketing right now is the fastest growing industry worldwide, a lot of it has to do with Covid-19 but just in the first quarter of 2020 the world saw a huge influx of spending on e-commerce and hence the revenue made from digital marketing has multiplies tenfold.
According to Statista, the total spending on digital advertisements is expected to reach a staggering $355,784m in 2020 and the projected volume generated just through search advertising can amount to $158,930.
Now, before we move forward, I should warn you that this blog is not about a bunch of high level fluff, instead everything you are about to read is super-tactical and actionable.
Let’s face it, SEO can be hard and it gets even harder when you read the same advice over and over again. We all know the stuff that I am talking about, things like:
- Optimize your title tags.
- Share your content on social media.
- Publish great content.
We, as marketers have a habit of reading the above mentioned tips on a daily basis and these are not completely useless advices but sticking strictly to these tip is not going to help you rocket you website to the top of Google. Why? Because everyone else with a website is following the exact same advice.
In order for your website to rank above them you need to do something that is completely different, which is exactly what I am going to walk you through, so don’t go anywhere:
Find An Opportunity Keyword:
An opportunity keyword is just like a regular keyword but better, I’ll explain how. You probably noticed that Google’s first page is packed with more stuff than ever before. For example, take a look at the first page of any keyword. Now, we see a bunch of ads above the fold, a featured snippet, a questions box and news results. This is the reason you should place a 100% focus on opportunity keywords.
What are opportunity keywords?
These are keywords which possess a higher organic click-through rate. In other words, there are terms that don’t have a bunch of stuff on the first page that distracts people from the organic results. When building website pages it is advised to build them around keywords which when searched on Google does not show ads and other snippets. When the keyword search page is clean it shows that Google’s focus is more on the organic results rather than ads and other question areas.
Bottom line here is to always look at the search results before picking a keyword. If the search is packed with stuff, consider going for an opportunity keyword that’s going to get you more clicks.
Check Out the Content Competition:
Well, you found an opportunity keyword, what’s next? Most people whip open WordPress and start writing and that is a huge mistake. In the past it would have been okay to write this way but today you have got to analyze the page results to see what is already working. In other words, your content competition.
Once you figure out the type of content that Google wants to see for a certain keyword, then you should start to creating content for that keyword.
Create Content That Is Different or Better:
When we are talking about creating content for SEO, you have two main possibilities. The first possibility, you can create something different. The second is to create something better, I’ll explain.
Most of the time you want to publish something that is just way better than what’s already out there, but sometimes it makes more sense to create something completely unique. For example, a few months ago I found the opportunity keyword “mobile SEO”, and when I observed the content competition, I noticed that most of the work was content list posts like “9 Tricks that Boost Your Site for Mobile”.
Consider the example of this post from The Digital Wheel, “Why You Need to Put ‘Marketing’ Back in ‘Content Marketing’”.
Rather than talking about the routine, countless-times-heard-before benefits of content marketing for businesses, the author explains why it is important to put marketing back in your content marketing efforts and what businesses are missing by focusing on creating mere content.
In other words, putting a different perspective in explaining the importance of content marketing for businesses.
Similarly it is always better to create content which is better then what is already on the internet. The key is to always check what kind of content is available for the same keyword and take it further from there.
Add Your Hook:
This is an advanced SEO strategy, so if you are new to SEOs you might want to skip this step and with that out of the way, here is how this works. You probably already know that in general pages with the most backlinks rank the highest on Google. But how do you get people to link to you?
Here is a simple, two-step process. Step 1, figure out why people link to content in your specific industry, AKA “The Hook”. Step 2, include that hook in your content. Let’s take an example, last year I noticed that more and more marketing blog posts were publishing content about “Voice Search” and when I read that content I noticed something interesting.
I noticed that most of the blog posts had almost always sited stats and when whenever a stat was mentioned it was linked to the source. So, I created my own blog about “voice search” featuring small bite sized stats and it got a very heavy reception. As stats and data are things other content creators are looking for, so your blog is linked and shared multiple times increasing the rank of your post.
Now, stats and data are one type of hook that you can use in your blogs post, in fact there are three other types of hooks that are working really well right now:
Unique Techniques:
What does a blog or a news site loves to cover? The answer is “New Stuff”. And when you create something new, you have got yourself a hook.
Ultimate Guide:
This is actually one of my favorite hooks because it’s really straight forward. In fact whenever a massive guide is published, the guide itself becomes the hook.
Case Studies:
Our last hook is used to include results for case studies in your content. In my opinion, case studies are one of the easiest hooks that you can use. If you want people to link to your study you need to feature one specific result because your post has that one specific result your content will get linked all the time.
Author bio:
Sami is a Digital Marketing Strategist at CMOLDS, an iOS app development services in the US. Having worked on multiple online brands throughout his career with an expertise in content marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and conversion rate optimization.
