SEO marketing can mean a number of things. Whenever you’re taking steps to increase your SEO rank, you can argue that you’re engaging in some form of SEO marketing. Still, there are various SEO marketing practices, some of which are more efficient than others.
Now, before we move any further, we must get one thing out of the way – we won’t give you a basic course with points like:
- Do your keyword research better.
- Improve the quality of your content.
- Arm yourself with patience.
Every guide has already covered this (more than once), and a person googling “how to do SEO yourself” has already seen it. It’s quite intuitive, and it’s the go-to solution even if you don’t have previous experience with SEO (or even know what SEO is). It makes sense that you’ll get more traffic if your content is better, right?
Instead, we’ll focus on some underused SEO practices, especially those that could be pretty useful in 2024.
Analyze the first page of Google results
If your main objective is to rank for specific keywords, you’re really aiming to get to the first page of SERPs. When doing your keyword research, you’ll see the keywords with the largest volume, but you’ll often skip these because they’re too competitive.
Instead, why not do some research and analysis on them and try to figure out how to do SEO by mimicking the success of others?
In other words, imagine an ideal world where you could pick a keyword and get to the No.1 spot on Google search, regardless of who else is competing for it. Well, the person who ranks first actually did just that. Why not check out their page and try to figure out how they did it?
What kind of content are they featuring? What’s their site architecture and metadata like?
Remember, you’re trying to mimic their SEO success, not “steal” the spot for that particular keyword from them.
Just bear in mind that it’s not all SEO. Sometimes, they’ll have a hefty war chest and spend a fortune on ads (this is usually the case for top results in some of the most saturated niches). This leaves you to try and figure out which of these is organic SEO and what is sponsored content (PPC, social media advertising, etc.).
Optimize for search intent
The majority of digital marketers get lost in trying to interpret what Google does instead of asking a simple question – what does Google want? The simplest answer is that Google wants to develop an algorithm that is so powerful that it will understand user intent, even when users have trouble verbalizing their thoughts. With the help of NLP technology, they’re closer to this than ever.
So, what is the most important thing to consider when optimizing a search engine marketing campaign? The short answer is understanding your customers’ intent and serving them what they’re looking for, not just what they’re typing into the search box.
One of the best ways to do this is to start by asking what they really want to know.
Imagine a person looking for a lemonade recipe. How would they start? They’ll look up either “how to make lemonade?” or “lemonade recipes.” The title of the post, therefore, needs to look like it actually contains all the answers that they’re looking for.
So, what’s the practice you’d want to use for turning marketing insights into action?
The simplest answer to this question is – intuitive thinking.
Just keep in mind that you aren’t always an average internet user or a perfect example of your target audience. You have detailed SEO knowledge and a deep insight into how the algorithms and search engines work. This affects your thought process even if you don’t realize it.
Instead, you need to conduct a survey or get an outsider’s insight. Even a small study or survey can help you understand this a lot better.
Focus on click-less interactions
Becoming a featured snippet is incredibly important, especially with so many Google searches ending without anyone actually clicking on a link. Some of the latest surveys talk about as much as 50.3% of all searches.
This is huge, and it’s a market you need to capitalize on.
You see, this is one of the biggest tricks for building strategies for your digital marketing. For one to eventually become a proper customer, they must first interact with your brand. This is a part of your long-term growth strategy. Even if they don’t click on the link, this still counts as an interaction. The big problem with this is that there’s no traffic increase with these clickless interactions, and traffic is a huge SEO metric.
In other words, qualifying for Google snippet is a horribly underrated aspect of SEO marketing that you cannot afford to ignore anymore.
First of all, you need to understand that, contrary to popular belief, paragraphs are the most common featured snippet type. They are roughly 70% of all snippets, with lists (the thing you would assume goes first) having only 19.1% of this market.
You can’t upload a paragraph hoping it will rank. It needs to be the right format. Everyone knows that answering a “How to” question is the easy way to get there, but what else can you do? Posts that are 1100+ words long have well-structured data, proper tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and images and are far more likely to qualify.
Featured snippets also vary from one industry to another. Industries that are featured the most often are:
- Travel
- Computer and electronics
- Art and entertainment
- Science
By doing this right, you’ll get a better understanding of audience behavior, higher brand authority (a huge SEO metric), and (indirectly) even a higher CTR. You see, there are different types of SEO, and they all benefit from advanced insights.
Find and fix technical issues
In order to run a successful SEO campaign, you need the right website strategy. Chances are that you already have a website, but it’s riddled with technical issues that are hampering your SEO without you even realizing it.
Some of these are:
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- JavaScript
- XML sitemaps
Sometimes, however, the problem will be too obvious and really hard to miss.
For instance, your content may be too thin. Many of your blog posts are old, and they may not generate any traffic. They’re probably a lot smaller, seeing as how the average blog post size has increased drastically over the years. Just finding 500-600-word posts, updating them with new content, and expanding them to be at least 1100+ words will make a world of difference for your SEO.
While this sounds really preposterous, carefully go through your blog, and you might just find a duplicate blog post. This is a huge problem for your SEO marketing and something you have to either remove or replace right away.
Most importantly, you need to identify 404 pages and 301 pages and deal with them accordingly. Keep in mind that while you may have a system in place looking out for these, a missed update or two could still hide these tracks and put you in a bit of an awkward spot.
It just doesn’t hurt to check everything twice, especially since Google is not omnipotent or omniscient, and they could have just found out about a problem that’s been present for a while. One of the biggest fallacies is believing that it’s a new problem because it just appeared.
Focus on targeted SEO
Another fallacy that newcomers to this field believe is that their rank can just grow in a vacuum. In reality, you need to find your realized niche and fight your best to rise in this closed (specific) ecosystem.
By trying to hit everyone, you’ll miss everyone. This is why you need to harness the power of targeted SEO.
This means exactly identifying your audience. Just think about it. Previously, we’ve talked about figuring out the intent behind the keyword. In order to do this, you need to know who’s typing.
A person looking for a tool that cuts through wood can be a carpenter or a gardener. The keywords are the same, but they use different tools. When making your campaign, what you’re actually doing is figuring out who you’re targeting and optimizing your keywords for the search of your ideal demographic. Anyone extra who falls into your net is a great bonus, but you need to know who your original audience is.
This is why it’s so tricky to engage in SEO and SMO traffic lead generation, seeing as how your audience may use specific jargon filled with amazing keywords that you’re just missing. Profiling your audience is the first thing you have to do to make a better campaign.
Using the right SEO practice is the basis for a great SEO marketing campaign
Ultimately, your choice of SEO practices makes all the difference in an SEO campaign. The bottom line is to understand that modern algorithms are way different than they were before. Knowing what they were looking for is more important than what they actually typed; they don’t have to click on the link to benefit your SEO (or even your link building), and regular checkups of your site are more important than you think.
