SEO has changed a lot since the inception of Google. These days, it’s not as simple as bookmarking and listing to a good rank in the SERPs. There are various ranking factors you need to be cognisant of. Because of this, there’s a single source that offers entirely covers SEO best practices or advice. That’s why, for today’s post, we’re providing you with a brief summary of the latest recommendation by leading industry specialists.
This blog post is about a misconception that Patel once had about SEO. From the beginning of his SEO career, he had mainly focused on generating more traffic to his website by writing informative posts. Some of the steps that he followed were very popular, even we used them at one time to increase website traffic because it really worked.
However, Patel points out that one of his friends had a business that was rapidly outpacing his when it came to revenue despite having lower website traffic. His friend’s fitness supplements business had its revenue increase by 44% in just one year, while its site traffic saw only a 3% growth. Patel’s own site, neilpatel.com had a 123% hike in traffic during that same year, but only saw a modest 12.5% boost in revenue. That’s when he realized that chasing after better ranking and traffic alone won’t help him earn more business.
Patel has never advised that webmasters stop doing SEO and instead invest in paid marketing. What he is saying is that marketers should focus more on the sources of where the conversions are coming from. He also says that SEO optimized landing pages are not that effective when it comes to improving the conversion rate. These pages need to be content rich so that Google can deem them an informative source on a particular topic. On the other hand, landing pages promoted through paid marketing can have clear interfaces with proper call to actions as they don’t need to have dense amounts of content on them.
To quote his words,
“SEOs are brainwashed from day one… they are taught that higher rankings and traffic are the most important things.
In reality, more revenue is what’s really important… that’s why PPC experts have the correct mindset. They optimize for revenue, sales, leads, and ROI instead of pure traffic.”
In this post, Rand explains how to set up SEO goals based on a business’ requirements. While most webmasters set their SEO goals first and then start working on the project, he emphasizes understanding the company’s goals first and only then setting SEO goals.
He also points out that search engine optimizers can’t scrape the keyword data to point out the pages that rank for a particular set of keywords. Thus, the SEOs should set up different metrics to measure and improve.
Fishkin goes into detail about goal metrics like ranking, organic search visits, SERP ownership, search volume, links, link metrics, and referral traffic. Another focus is on branded and non-branded search where webmasters need to differentiate and optimize the pages that would come up when brand name and some relevant information is searched for.
The blog post discusses 21 powerful SEO techniques. Along with some common processes, Dean goes over some unique ways of finding the best keywords, getting links from high authority sites, optimizing content in a way that it gets maximum the number of shares, beating competitors in search results, and building links from broken URLs. He even touches on some subtle SEO methods like finding keywords from Reddit, updating old blog posts, copying AdWords ad copies, linking out to authority sites and optimizing content for semantic SEO.
Have you already read through any of the above-mentioned posts? Do you already follow these top influencers? If not, visit them now and find out how they can help you gain more visibility on the search engines.