SEO should be a focus in your efforts to grow your business. And that focus should begin well before you launch – working SEO into your business and marketing plan. And it should continue on consistently after you launch to ensure your business earns and maintains prime real estate in search results.
On a recent #AGMarketingChats session, we were fortunate to have one of the top SEO minds in the world as our guest. Nikola Roza joined us, offering actionable tips to help you take your brand from invisible to page one on Google.
In this recap of our chat, you’ll learn about:
- Why SEO is so important for your business
- The top tactics you should apply to boost your site
- Underrated SEO tactics you don’t want to miss out on
- Top tips for earning powerful backlinks
- Internal linking tips…and so much more
Let’s jump in. What better place to start than question #1, right?
Q1: Why is a strong focus on SEO so important for businesses?
SEO is critical for any business with an online presence. Sadly, however, there are still a lot of holdouts pushing back, not understanding the value they’re missing by not placing a focus on SEO.
Visitors who land on your website via search engines are often much more engaged and interested in what you have to say on your site and what you’re selling. Search traffic is often more cost-effective than advertising as well. If you put in the effort, invest the time, the traffic will flow in.
Q2: What do you tell a website owner who questions the value of having an SEO strategy in place?
Whether you’re in a full-time marketing role with a company, you’re working with an agency and trying to explain SEO to your client, or you’re a solo operator talking to a new prospect, you’ll likely find you get full buy-in for SEO right away or you get immediate pushback. SEO is still a bit of a confusing subject for some, and many business owners still view it as some kind of black magic. So, knowing that SEO has tons of value for any business with an online presence, what’s the best way to get that value across?
It’s challenging, sometimes, to simply explain the value of SEO. So, when you’re pitching SEO to a client or to your boss, it’s important that you cite examples from situations where a similar business gained a serious lift from focusing on SEO.
Q3: What are some of the top SEO tactics you recommend to your clients?
SEO is a big field. There are over 200 ranking factors that Google considers when determining where to serve up your website in search results. It’s not practical to try to tackle all of those factors. As such, it’s important for a business to know where to place its focus to gain as much benefit from SEO as possible.
You can learn a lot using tools like Semrush to assess your own content as well as do some spying on your competitors to learn what’s working from them and then improve on that. This tactic can help position your updated or new content to take over the search rankings currently occupied by your competitors.
Q4: What are the most underrated SEO tactics that can help businesses stand out?
When SEO comes to mind, we tend to first think about link building along with a number of other popular tactics. But, what about those underrated SEO tactics that you can exploit? The ones your competitors may be overlooking?
Don’t forget to focus on improving your internal linking. It’s critical to show Google what’s important on your page and highlight the things you really want to rank for. On-page SEO is super important, so don’t miss out on these opportunities to make your business more visible in search.
Q5: Can you explain the connection between quality content and SEO?
Ah, my favorite topic! The wonderful union between content and SEO. In the old days (think 2010 or so), SEOs and content marketers battled one another for supremacy. One tended to always want to argue that the other discipline was wrong and their side was right. Fortunately, most of us have come to realize that to truly be successful, content and SEO need to work together.
Nikola’s statement is a major argument for the value of long-form content vs. more limited, short-form content. The longer, more in-depth you go on a subject, the longer you keep the reader on the page to improve the user experience, and the more keywords you can work naturally into a piece of content.
Q6: Backlinks are an important ranking factor. What are your top tips for earning backlinks?
Let’s bring the conversation back around to backlinks. Earning high-quality, relevant backlinks is super important in boosting your site’s search rankings. Backlinks are arguably one of the (if not the) top factors in ranking your site. They are not, however, easy to earn. So, what backlink sourcing tips can we take home to help make it easier?
Connecting and building relationships with other bloggers and marketing pros makes it much easier to build links. Work together to help one another grow. Grab a link for your colleagues, and then they’ll likely reciprocate and drop a link into their next blog post that links back to your site. Just make sure you add as much, if not more, value for other bloggers as they do for you. It’s a two-way street.
Q7: Internal links are super important for SEO. Are there any tools or tracks site owners can use to determine the best internal linking strategy?
Link Whisper and other tools can help you uncover internal linking opportunities to improve your site’s internal linking. And good thing because if you have a large site, going back and manually digging into internal linking opportunities can be a bit of a drag.
Q8: What’s one last nugget of SEO wisdom you’d like to leave us with today?
Thanks for dropping by to read through this episode of #AGMarketingChats. Nikola is a master in the SEO space, so please visit his website to learn how to give your site a serious lift in SERPS. And drop by our #AGMarketingChats archives to check out other past chats and learn about upcoming ones.
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