Tag: SEO|SEO strategies

Well, when it is about search engine optimization, it is not always as well understood as any other digital marketing aspects. Most of the business organizations would choose to hire SEO experts. This is absolutely fine. However, what is not okay is choosing to get cheap SEO services.

Yes, we understand that as a business owner you would obviously want to look for areas to reduce expenditure. The question is, do you want to do it by damaging your business? Due to lack of understanding, a lot of companies think cheap SEO packages will offer them the same benefits.

However, that is not true at all. We know a lot of business owners think like that. But we can assure you that this blog will completely change the way you think about SEO services. It is important to remember that short term gains will not do you any good if you want to run your business for a long time.

To avoid long-term losses, you have to opt for high-quality SEO service providers. There are some things that you should never bring on the cost-cutting tables. High-quality SEO services are one of them.

What do you get in a cheap SEO service?

First of all, remember that cheap SEO service packages will cost you way too much. Why? Cheap SEO includes blackhat SEO tactics. Now, let us explain in layman’s terms what are aspects included in black hat SEO tactics.

Black hat SEO tactics will include keyword stuffing within the content, use of unnecessary and irrelevant keywords, buying backlinks instead of earning them, keyword spamming, and redirects that yield high ranks.

All of these are black hat SEO services that come in cheap. The companies that offer these services will claim to bring a huge number of visitors to your website and also get your website at the top of the Google search engine results page (SERP). First of all, the companies that make such claims are fraud one because no one can guarantee the number position in Google SERP.

Secondly, even if that happens by a miracle, then too, it will not be sustainable. The reason being, the search engine algorithms, and crawlers are capable of identifying the spams and they will take down your website in a very short time.

A good SEO service provider will keep up with industry standards. They will make sure that their client can continue to reap the benefits of SEO. This is not a one time process. A cheap SEO service will get you up and running for one time but they will not be there to assist you once you face any obstacles.

What differentiates good SEO and bad/cheap SEO?

First of all, when you are choosing an SEO company, get references, and check their reviews. However, be careful about the review because a lot of companies have manipulated their online reviews. Consider the review sources.

Secondly, check the online ranking of the company. Most of the SEO organizations do not rank locally. Sometimes they can rank for a single keyword phrase. Cheap SEO companies that cannot rank themselves will not be able to get your job done. They cannot get multiple rankings for you.

Thirdly, if a company tells you that their work is quick, easy and it will not involve any change in the website, then it is not the right company. The reason is, SEO is as good as the website and every website has some room for improvement.

Lastly, if a company offers you a package of one-size-fits-all, then you should never choose that organization. Every website has different SEO requirements. Yes, it is true that sometimes there can be similar requirements between two websites of the same industry, but that doesn’t mean every website should have the same package.

What are the signs of a good SEO agency?

A good SEO agency will not promise you any miracles. It is all about hard with knowledge and a bit of smartness. A proper SEO service that genuinely improves your website rankings, will take time (at least 3 months), experience, testing, and creativity. There will be incremental improvements. Also, the return on investment will seem to be gradual initially, but the value of those returns will increase over time.

Another important aspect of a good SEO agency is, even if you don’t have a high budget, the agency will know how to put your money to best use. They will come up with better SEO plans that are tailored to meet your needs. You will start to see gradual results in a short time.

As we mentioned about the black hat SEO strategies earlier, all these are done by someone who has less knowledge and experience about SEO. Remember that SEO is one of the most important aspects of a website. Since cheap SEO mostly involves all the black hat SEO strategies, it will get your website either blacklisted or penalized.

A bad SEO doesn’t follow the guidelines of the search engines. It is even worse than having no SEO at all. Now let us have a look at the SEO salary stats provided by Glassdoor.

A breakdown of SEO work and salary balance

The average SEO salary for 1-3 years is $55,000, for 4-6 years of experience is $64,000, for 7-9 years is $76, 000, for 10-15 years is $85,000. The basic SEO effort for a simple site requires 10 hours per month.

For the sites of low competition niche, can require even less than 10 hours in a month. If you want to continue receiving the ROI of 3 times you get now, then you have to continue with the 10 hours of SEO work every month.

If you don’t you might get away with a few months but eventually, your results will start degrading. Now, if you are paying someone $500 in a month, you are paying them for their time.

If the minimum livable wages are $30,000 in a year, then an SEO professional will need at least 10 projects of $500 in a month including the taxes and infrastructure costs, SEO subscription tools costs, overhead computer costs, and more, to reach his annual salary of $30,000.

Now, this brings the cost to $15 an hour with 10 projects and 100 hours to work in a month. So you see, if someone is good at SEO, you will not get them below $15 per hour. Obviously, you would not want someone who is not good at his work.

Some final words

It is important to remember that SEO strategies evolve along with the content of a website. Without any content, there will be no scope of SEO. This is why both content and SEO should move in sync because the content is the key to building long-term and sustainable SEO performance.

Good quality content is a primary differentiator between good and bad SEO. Therefore, when you are choosing an SEO service providing company, you have to make sure that they offer good quality content writing services and digital marketing services as well.

It is important to understand and use SEO effectively to increase search traffic and brand awareness. Millions of people right now are looking for content just like yours. You will be able to help them by being an SEO expert.

80% of a website’s traffic starts with a search query. This is why search engine optimization is so important. However, to stay on top of your SEO game will take a lot of research, trial, and errors. Google algorithms are constantly updated. Thus, you have to stay tuned to the latest updates.

Keeping this in mind, let’s get started with the 17 advanced SEO strategies that will help in increasing search traffic in 2020.

1. Ranking for ‘Journalist Keywords’

So what are Journalist Keywords? These are the terms that journalists use to search for something. These keywords are a great way to build backlinks. A journalist needs specific stats for their articles and they Google it.

Using terms like “average” or “median” with phrases like ‘daily-users’ or ‘page-speed’ increases the chances of the website getting ranked on Google. For instance, the complete phrase becomes, ‘average daily users’ or ‘average page speed’.

2. Use animated images to reduce bounce rate

It is important to make your audience stay on your website. The best way to do it is to use high-resolution animated images. Animated images stop people from skimming. They read more content and spend more time on your site.

3. Creating content hubs

28% of the organic traffic from backlinks comes from content hubs. Content hubs are kind of a mini Wikipedia on a topic. A content hub is a forum where website visitors will be able to find a lot of branded, curated, social media, user-generated, or any type of content regarding any topic. It is smaller than a website and bigger than a blog. Here is an example of a content hub from American Express. Their content hub is known as OPENforum.

4. Target comparison keywords

Comparison keywords are those that compare different things. These are like the following;

• Content marketing vs. SEO
• iPhone vs. Android
• Webflow vs. WordPress

Comparison keywords help people in deciding between two options and they don’t have much competition. So they rank well. If you can create content optimized with “You vs Competitor” with comparison keywords, it will be helpful.

5. Using dynamic parameters for pagination

This is a technical aspect of SEO. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to get a new page indexed. Google spiders take forever to crawl a new page. A simple trick is to change the new page address from this:

https://xyz.com/business-topics/page/2

To this

https://xyz.com/business-topics?page=2

This is a new format to get a new page indexed in Google to figure out the paginated page URL patterns. It makes Google find new pages instead of recrawling the old pages.

6. Backlinks with podcasts

At present, podcasts are the new guest posts and in some ways better than them. To create a guest post, you have to find a site, pitch them, write a draft, edit them, and then get published. But, for a podcast, all you need is to show up. That’s it. Going to podcasts is the best link building strategy used for backlinking. Make sure you pitch for the audience with a specific thing to offer. Audio quality should be good and start by creating small podcasts.

7. Create a content alliance

Creating a content alliance is when you team up with other businesses, their website, blogs, or YouTube channel on content. You can partner with someone that has got the data you need and promoting them on your website in exchange. You can also partner by sharing your content/data to them.

8. Maximizing the SERP real estate

The #1 search result in Google gets 32% organic clicks. There is another way to get more clicks from SERPs – using the SERP real-estate. The SERP real-estate is how many pixels you can control on Google’s first page.

The more pixels you can control, the more traffic you will be able to get from the keyword. For instance, getting ranked in a featured snippet will put you on the top of the page also; it will triple the SERP real estate for the keyword.

You can take up more SERP real estate by using medium articles, guest posts, YouTube videos, featured snippets, rich snippets, and top stories.

9. Embed original images into the content

High-quality content makes your image better. This helps in improving search engine rankings. But duplicate images (stock photos) can hurt your page rankings. This is why it is better to use original images as much as possible.

If you have original images, people might start to use your images in their blog posts and give your website link as the source. This increases traffic.

10. Optimize content for keyword relevance

On-page SEO is not only about keyword stuffing. Google wants to see relevant content on a certain topic. To give Google a signal that you have relevant content on a topic, you have to use Latent Semantic Indexing keywords. These are conceptually related terms that the search engines use for understanding content on a webpage.

Thus, when you use a lot of LSI keywords you confirm to Google that your page is relevant for a certain query. This will give you a better ranking for your target keyword. A simple way to do this is to create in-depth content where you will automatically use the LSI keywords.

11. Create a comments section on the blog

Comments can help SEO in three ways;

Firstly, the comments work as the direct ranking factor.

Secondly, they offer more stuff to users to read.

Finally, Google crawls the comments section. Thus, it works as an important segment to get ranked and indexed.

12. Uncover the “people also ask” keywords

41% of all the Google search results comprise a “people also ask” section. This is why it is important to optimize them as well. The only factor is, you have to find these questions. You can use a free tool called “people also ask”. This tool scrapes these questions once you put in the keywords.

13. Adding content features to the page is helpful

Content features include calculators, comparison charts, feature breakdowns, a bullet list of pros and cons, summaries, and quote boxes. These are the things that you add to your content to make it much more valuable and informative. Content features will directly or indirectly improve Google rankings.

14. Publish topic + year content

Topic + year content are the blog posts that cover the primary trends happening around a given topic. For instance when you optimize a post using keywords like “top SEO strategies 2020”, it gets a competitive edge. Because SEO is an extremely competitive keyword, but when you add 2020 to it, Google recognizes it as trending.

This is not the same as adding “2020” at the end of a title tag. If you add 2020 at the end of a title, the whole content has to be based on the SEO trends of 2020.

15. Backlinks from unlinked brands

Unlinked brand mentions are the mentions in blog posts and news articles that don’t link to your website. You can email the person that mentioned your brand and ask them to add a link to your website. It has a great conversion rate.

16. Optimize for Google Discover

This is just like the social media newsfeed of Google. The only difference is, instead of featuring posts from the people you follow, Google will show high-quality content that they think you like. Using high-quality images is an optimization technique for Google Discover. Apart from that, create fresh content on popular topics, engage on twitter, and use graphs.

17. Find out the low-competition keywords from Reddit

An easy way to do this is to pop a subreddit into the SEMrush or Ahrefs. Check out all the keywords in that subreddit and that’s it. You have a list of low-competition keywords. You will also find a lot of junk keywords. This is why you can use a quick CPC filter to get good keywords.

Here are the top 17 SEO strategies that work perfectly in digital marketing to increase the search traffic. So which ones are you going to try first? Share your thoughts with Skyram Technologies in the comments section.