Think of yourself as an asset portfolio manager, because that’s what you are. In the same way fund managers need to analyze company financial data and operational performance before making investment decisions, you need to analyze your SEO competitors to inform your investment decisions. Increasing your search visibility is a good thing, clearly, but it takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish those rising rankings, and there’s no guarantee how much extra traffic they’re going to send your way. Especially for local or small businesses, determining your niche is very important. When you know your niche, you can emphasize what makes your products or brand unique, therefore improving your odds to rank well for them. Over the years many people have tried to game the system by creating content that is stuffed full of keywords in the hope that repeating their keyword phrases over and over again will in some way get them to the top spot of Google. While this tactic may have worked in the 90’s and early 2000’s it is time to put this to bed and stop creating content that is written solely for the search engines. These search engines have evolved and now recognise and reward natural language so the best piece of advice is to write naturally and for humans.

SEO keyword research best practice

If you are really interested in improving your SEO, a strategy needs to be formulated. An SEO expert will need to identify the services or products that drive the most revenue for your business so he can deploy an SEO strategy based on your actual business model. You may not have the resources to create locale sites for each country or language you want to target. In that case, add Google Translate to your site to ensure that your website visitors can see your content in their language (even if it’s not a perfect translation). The tactic of improving your pages to earn more traffic through being more relevant to search queries, on-page SEO is something everyone can do. Our goal is to craft a page that helps the searcher achieve their goal, answering the intent of their search. Your efforts should focus on being as relevant and helpful as possible. Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. We like to use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website over time.

Understand which tools will give you easy, intuitive, and accurate insights

Search engine optimization is perhaps one of the greatest marketing tools to come about online, but without proper article submissions it won’t work out to your liking. That is why it’s imperative to search and find the best article directories to submit your hard earned work and watch the numbers start to add up. 9 out of 10 people users make use of Search Engines to find an answer to their query. When these users type in their keywords/query, the Search Engine’s bots and spiders run their complex algorithms, scan through the giant database that has been crawled and indexed by them. They, then come up with results (websites) whose keywords matches with that of the query. It seems the world is going mobile, with many people using mobile phones on a daily basis, and a large user base searching on Google’s mobile search page. However, as a webmaster, running a mobile site and tapping into the mobile search audience isn't easy. Long Tail SEO is a really useful technique to generate organic search traffic for your website.

The Role of Anchor Text

Google has thousands of ranking factors and sub-factors that go into their algorithm and we could talk about them all for hours. Understanding the most important SEO ranking factors will get you on the right track fast and let you understand what your primary focus should be when optimizing for your website or blog. As you create content for your website, link to other pages on your site within your content. Use anchor text that uses the page’s target keywords or phrases that explain what the page is about. Higher rankings lead to more clicks and visits from interested searchers, and that search traffic is uniquely valuable because of its high relevancy and timeliness -- people search when they’re interested or ready to perform an action. According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "Google’s web indexing system favors recently updated content, especially for time-sensitive searches."

Carve out time for updating and improving older SEO content

From a usability point of view, it makes sense to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly as over 56% of all traffic now comes from mobile devices. This means that if you want to keep those users engaged then you need a mobile-friendly website. Most people browsing the internet will visit and leave pages in quick bursts. Many of them don’t convert while on your website. Some of them may visit while your product is out of stock. Others may just be in the “curious” stage and not ready to make a purchase yet. Mobile-first. It’s coming. And I still feel that a responsive website, in addition to all the AMP and so, is essential. While Google is the big dog when it comes to search engines, don’t forget about Bing. It does hold a considerable share of the search market. While focusing on user experience as we’ve advocated will work for Bing as well, you should do technical audits of your site for both search engines, to make sure you have not missed any important element.