Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a never-ending challenge to rank for keywords and earn organic traffic from Google. Without organic traffic, your website and business could flame-out and fail. With Google's search algorithms constantly changing, you need all the tips you can get to help stay on Page 1 longer or climb higher in the SERPs.
Here are 3 simple tips to improve your website SEO results:
Learn how to use social media data for SEO You’ve heard to no end about how powerful and sophisticated Google’s search AI is, from BERT to TF-Ranking to Google RankBrain, and how difficult it makes SEO for the average marketer. How do you keep up? How do you fight for SEO results when bigger competitors can afford to leverage millions of dollars in technology and people to build their own AI-powered SEO?
We've written many articles and blog posts to show you how to work around many of these problems. Lean Startup Life SEO outlines a solution for modern SEO when you don’t have your own AI engineers or millions of dollars to invest in building your own sophisticated AI: optimizing SEO using social media data. Think of it as data for humans, by humans - and it’s data that will help your SEO efforts improve substantially.
In our blog posts you’ll learn: How search engine AI has evolved (in layman’s terms) How search engines learn (especially Google) How to use social media monitoring data to refine your SEO efforts How to use social media monitoring data to inform content marketing format choices How to blend search and social data together to find the right time to roll out new content. The SEO articles are free here on The Lean Startup Life Blog.
2. Improve Your SEO Writing For Google Greatness
SEO writing isn't all fun and games. It requires strategy, keyword research, and productive systems to keep you on track if you are writing high volume or long form content. Here are some simple tips to write better for SEO:
- Take your time on the research portion of the writing process. Read and digest the seed articles before crafting your own content. A well-thought-out and researched article is instantly elevated over one compromised with filler and high-level facts.
- Take five-minute breaks every hour or so during the SEO writing process. Give yourself an opportunity to get away from the screen. A little break is a great way to recharge.
- Take your time on the research portion of the writing process. Chances are, someone has at least touched on the very same topic you’re writing about.
- Take the time to read and digest similar articles before crafting your own content. You may be able to write a few paragraphs freestyle without pre-planning, but it will show in the quality of your work. A well thought-out and researched piece is instantly elevated over one comprised of mostly filler and high-level facts.
- Take your time on the research portion of the blog writing process. Chances are, someone has at least touched on the very same topic you’re writing about.
- Work somewhere where you have to be "presentable". Pajamas on the couch won't cut it. If you go to a coffee shop or at least look the part, you'll feel more productive.
If you add these to your SEO writing repertoire you will get better results in no time!
3. Optimize Your Website For Voice Searches
With the massive growth of audio assistants (Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, Siri), there as been an explosion of voice searches. These audio searches are eating up a small portion of the search market, so you want to make sure you optimize your posts for voice search as well so your websites aren't missing out on traffic.
Make sure you include plenty of helpful long-tail keywords and question - answer terminology. Think about how voice searches are different than typed search queries and your content will be more successful.
Not all businesses need to prioritize voice search the same way, so make an overall assessment before investing too much time and money into voice SEO.
4. Increase Your Traffic From Non Search Engine Sources
Increasing your website traffic from sources other than search engines like Google and Bing can help improve SEO indirectly. But before we get into this further, let's first start with a ma thematic principle first:
One of the most overlooked basic mathematical concepts in marketing is the logistic function. Mathematically expressed, it looks something like this: dP / dt = rP (1-P/K)
Now, that may not mean a whole lot, but it’s a way of modeling things like population carrying capacity. A logistic function looks like this: Basic logistic function At this point you may be saying, “This is too obscure, what’s the point?” Logistic functions help us to understand the upper bounds of what’s possible, what’s probable. In some pitch decks for startups, you’ll see hilarious charts that always show a hockey stick of growth for whatever product or service is being marketed to investors.
The reality we face is that we don’t have an infinite audience for our sales and marketing efforts. Depending on what we sell, there may be very strict limits as to how quickly we can market.
For example, suppose we have an email list like this newsletter. How much email could you send before people start getting irritated and unsubscribing? You can’t send infinite amounts of email and expect never-ending performance growth from it. You’d want to track your data to find out when you were hitting diminishing returns. In the beginning of a logistic function, the speed of your data is flat. Then it grows and picks up speed, like in the early part of an ad campaign. For a while, growth is steady and solid. Life is good.
Then you start noticing performance slowing down. Ad spend goes up. Clicks drop. And finally, you hit a point where you’re getting less and less while spending more and more, be it time, money, or effort. Why? Because you’ve hit the saturation point for that particular audience, strategy, and set of tactics. There may not be any more people who are valid, attainable customers in that particular segment of your market. How do you know when you’ve hit that point? The math behind it is startlingly easy. Suppose you have some data, like website visitors:
Charts of growth Website visitors are your data. How much your website visitors increase or decrease over any given period of time is the velocity of your website traffic - and that rate of change is the logistic function you’d be wanting to measure, dividing your change in a metric over a period of time. When your rate of change slows down, you’ve lost momentum and it’s time to switch up strategies and tactics. That kind of thing isn’t easy to eyeball, so if you look at the rate of your rate of change - essentially, an acceleration or deceleration number - you can know with mathematical certainty whether or not you’re speeding up or slowing down.
On the top-most chart, your acceleration number in the growth section would be positive. Your acceleration number in the slowdown part would be negative, and it would be flat - zero - in the flat sections. When your acceleration goes consistently negative for more than a couple of time periods, you’ve probably hit the upper part of your logistic function. You’ve hit diminishing returns, and it’s time to change things up. This is something you can do in a spreadsheet.
You don’t need fancy code or a data scientist, just basic subtraction and division. But measuring your marketing data and seeing if logistic functions are at work is a great way to avoid overspending time and effort on tactics and strategies that aren’t delivering for you any more.
Get Growing On Google
Nobody said SEO would be easy, they just said it would be worth it! Keep these 3 simple search engine optimization tips in mind to keep growing on Google year after year despite the ever-changing SEO industry.
