Every day, marketers wrestle with the question of how to develop and execute an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. The benefits of an effective SEO strategy are wide-ranging and well-documented, but primarily center around increasing the amount of traffic your website receives. This, in turn, attracts and engages prospects—and can nurture those relationships into conversions.
SEO has been around since at least the 1990s, so we don’t blame you for being a bit skeptical, or asking questions like, “Is SEO still a thing in 2023?” The short answer is a simple yes—and that rumors of SEO’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. That does, however, come with the caveat that the types of SEO techniques that worked in the early days no longer work today. Consumers and search engines are both too smart for techniques like keyword stuffing to accomplish much of anything.
Instead, digital marketers need to equip themselves with modern tools and techniques if they want to compete and see their website rank well with Google and other search engines.
So, where do you start? What are the best SEO techniques in digital marketing, and how can you leverage them today? Keep reading for a brief overview, including simple SEO tips for better rankings.
The answer is simple: results. That’s obviously a bit of an oversimplification, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The fact is that you could spend endless money experimenting with different SEO techniques and tools, and you’d probably see some success. It wouldn’t necessarily be consistent success, though, and it might not be a repeatable process.
Next, let’s look at some of the best practices for SEO success in 2023 and beyond.
Every success story, whether we’re talking about SEO or something entirely unrelated, begins with a clear goal or target. With SEO, that means:
When it comes to SEO, putting all of your proverbial eggs in one basket is not a wise move—even if it’s a really great basket. What if the strategy doesn’t resonate with your audience? What if your single strategy doesn’t succeed? To avoid these predicaments, the best SEO strategies employ a multi-pronged approach that includes:
In order to succeed with SEO, you need to define exactly what that success will look like. How do you quantify and measure SEO outcomes? Selecting the right metrics to track isn’t just important for gauging results, but it also enables you to understand exactly which techniques are working and which aren’t. With those insights, you can further refine your techniques in subsequent campaigns.
In terms of performance and results, the best SEO metrics to track include things like:
In the world of modern SEO, building authority is the name of the game. In other words, a digital marketer’s job is to leverage various SEO practices in a way that signals to search engines—as well as prospective customers—that your business is an authority in the industry. To elaborate further, there are two sides to this point:
If an effective SEO strategy is one that’s targeted, multifaceted, measurable, and timely/relevant, then there’s one strategy in particular that checks off each of these boxes—Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM).
In basic terms, Pillar-Based Marketing is an SEO strategy that prioritizes driving content performance and organic traffic by writing the right content, for the right customer profile, at the right time. PBM is all about producing, publishing, and promoting website content that is keyword-driven but also genuinely valuable, helpful content.
DemandJump, the world’s first and only PBM platform, removes much of the mystery around developing an effective SEO strategy. It involves writing a network of interconnected, informative content that prospective customers will find when they’re searching for the type of thing your business is there to help them with.
Getting started with PBM—and on your way to page one—is easy:
Despite what you may have been told, getting SEO right doesn’t have to be a maddening process driven by guesswork or trial-and-error processes. When you use the right tools in the right ways, you can stop spinning your wheels, demystify SEO, and write your own success story.