Gone are the days of tricking search engines into ranking your content higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines have made it clear that they’ll prioritize white hat SEO techniques over their black hat counterparts. What are white hat and black hat techniques in SEO? White hat SEO centers around ethical practices, like keyword research and writing quality content, to gain organic traffic to your website. Black hat SEO, on the other hand, uses unethical means, like keyword stuffing and paid backlink farms, to drive organic traffic. Search engines nowadays will penalize any websites that use black hat SEO techniques by ranking it lower in SERPs.
Suffice it to say, if you want to rank in search engines, you have to put in the work instead of cheating the system. There are five top strategies you should follow to rank highly and stay there. And as an added bonus, we’ll discuss an SEO content tool and a content SEO strategy that makes it easy to follow the top five best practices and drive results. Let’s jump in!
The top five SEO strategies are:
With Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM), you can implement all the SEO strategies listed above.
Pillar-Based Marketing is an SEO content strategy that allows you to build an entire web of content around a topic you want your business to rank for. By creating at least 16 pieces of content around a single topic, and interlinking all of them, you build authority around that topic. What are those 16 pieces of content?
As noted above, each piece of content will require you to do keyword research. Any questions you pull can be used as headers throughout your content to make your content more scannable and mobile friendly. These keywords will also ensure that you answer your audience’s questions.
The PBM linking strategy drives all traffic to your Pillar page and some of your traffic to the Sub-Pillar pages. It enables you to build authority, or establish your expertise, around those more general topics that you want to rank for. To build your authority and see results quickly, you should post all 16 pieces of content at once. You can then create new pieces of content, like a related podcast or guest blog, influenced by the pieces from your Pillar strategy. You can even go back and add more content to older strategies if you want to maintain your authority on that particular topic—and to post new content 1-4 times a week like we mentioned.
DemandJump makes it easy to build a PBM strategy. Simply type a term into our “Set Pillar Topics” tab, and you’ll see suggestions for titles of pieces you should write surrounding that topic. We also provide you keyword and question suggestions on our “Get Topic Insights” and “Content Briefs” tabs.
The three main objectives of search engine optimization techniques and strategies like PBM are to:
To rank higher in SERPs, boost organic traffic, and increase conversions, you need to implement a PBM strategy of your own.
Pillar-Based Marketing is a must-do content strategy for any company that wants to see results from their marketing efforts—and we’re guessing your company falls into that category. We at DemandJump created the PBM strategy to combine many of the top SEO practices implemented today into a singular plan for you to follow. To learn more about PBM, purchase the book that our Chief Solution Officer and co-founder wrote. Or you can create a DemandJump account to start building a PBM strategy of your own.