WHAT ARE THE MOST POWERFUL SEO TACTICS FOR 2018 AND BEYOND? There are so many different tactics that make up a part of SEO, each with different levels of importance and effectiveness. As SEO is always evolving, so to should consider your tactics and strategy. If you don’t evolve with the times, then you will quickly be left behind in the dust.
The tactics you deploy don’t need to be overly complicated or confusing either. And if you are tackling SEO yourself, then you shouldn’t attempt anything you don’t fully understand to avoid dangerous mistakes that can be very costly on your website ranking. The tactics listed below can be implemented simply and quickly to ensure you are keeping up with the best practices and latest trends of 2018. Take a look below at the top SEO tactics for 2018:
TACTIC 1: IMPROVE THE USER EXPERIENCE User experience has never been more important. SEO now isn’t solely about pleasing Google to get a good ranking, and you also need to ensure users have a great experience when they are on your website. Many people don’t realise how many benefits there are when it comes to improving your user experience and integrating it in with SEO. Take a look at some of the main benefits below: Improves website content Helps to speed up the user buying cycle Improves the click-through rate by specifically targeting the user Assists in discovering new keyword areas that are best to target Improves the goal completions as well as your overall sales Helps to encourage more website testing and overall improvements
TACTIC 2: CAPITALISE ON LOCAL SEO Local SEO has been around for a little while now, and it is become more and more important, no matter the type of business you run. It is essential that you capitalise on local SEO through the use of keywords like “near me” or “close by”. These days, there are a lot of people using those keywords to search for any given product or service. Example, if you were looking for a local Thai restaurant, you would probably search “Thai restaurant near me”. To put it simply, there has been dramatic growth in people searching for these types of terms, so you need to ensure that your local SEO game is on point to get the most out of people searching for these terms. But how do you go about applying this tactic? Well, there are many different effective ways to do this. Firstly, you revisit your old content. Get a close look at your blog and your service pages and smoothly integrate the local search keywords into your content. As well as revisiting old content you should also create new content around these search terms. Blogs are a particularly great way to showcase your local SEO tactics. For example, “how to choose the best Thai food place near you” or even “comparing the best Thai places near you”.
TACTIC 3: DON’T ONLY THINK ABOUT KEYWORDS. Instead, you also need to think about the topic areas you want to focus on. There are a few reasons as to why you should expand your focus. Firstly, recent Google updates showed increasingly high levels of speculation concerning pages that have overly targeted keywords/ search terms. As well as this, user expectations have changed, and they now require more in-depth levels of content. They don’t want to have to keep clicking on your website until they find what they are looking for, they want it all in the one place. Lastly, high ranking and performing content tends to be longer and incorporates different content types and usually increases the chance of sharing and other link signals. Therefore, it is important that you think of a highly engaging topic and let the keywords flow naturally, rather than building content based on only the keywords you want to use.
TACTIC 4: DO NOT PANIC WHEN ISSUES ARISE. It will almost never be smooth sailing in SEO, so, therefore, it is crucial that you do not panic if there is a bump in the road. It is vital that when there is an issue you look for ways to expand and overcome – not shrink your website. For example, if you get a backlink penalty it is the first instinct to remove those backlinks (usually through Google’s disavow tool). While this is true, also you need to remember that you are losing some of your backlinks, so you then need to work on increasing your backlink number, just to quality websites. Another example comes from when there’s a full redesign of a website. People think that a new web design means that they need all new content. This is not always certainly the case. Most of the time the content is still right to go to your new site.