Every business owner has faced the dilemma of their SEO not working. They invest hundreds, if not thousands of dollars into improving their website’s SEO ranking, inbound traffic, leads and sales only to fall victim to penalties or ineffective strategies and tactics. For many, it is a bitter pill to swallow and it is the reason why many cry out that “SEO is dead”.
You may feel that way. But the good news is if you do, you can resurrect your site from the death of SEO with the “Lazarus SEO strategy”. It may not take 3 days like in the story of Lazarus, but you can bring your SEO to life with these effective tactics in 2018.
Start by fixing your website’s content.
It’s amazing to see how many people overlook their content. It is the most important factor on their website and it’s surprising to see how people will try to cut corners with their content in order to save a few dollars.
The content is your online salesperson. It will influence and persuade people to take action. Furthermore, it will influence and convince Google and the other search engines to rank your site at the top of the organic search results. If you ignore this as a business, how can you expect Google to seriously consider ranking your business at the top of the search results. Especially if the competition has also gone above and beyond to create compelling content for their target audience.
Fix the website’s content in terms of the keyword relevancy and phrases that people are looking for. Ensure that these appear within the title, description, headings and the main body of the web page’s content.
Demonstrate value in your content by sharing as much information as possible.
Many business owners think that they can getaway with little to no content on their web pages. In some niches, it may be the case. However, Google wants to serve results that will answer their user’s questions and allow them to have a good experience with their search engine. If your web content isn’t informative and forces them to navigate away to another site, it won’t send a positive signal to Google.
Develop long-form content that is 500 words or more on a web page. Invest in compelling images or videos and ensure that the bounce rate of the page is minimised as much as possible.
Let Google know as much about your business as possible.
The information that is on your website should eliminate any uncertainties that people will have with your business. Google is making this easier by reading structured data (Schema) and associating website information with the semantic web and its knowledge graph.
Information about your business’s location, industry, personnel, logos, operations, reviews and more can be referenced by Google as authority signals, which can help improve your organic search ranking.
You can easily follow the schema markup guides provided by Google for developers. Additionally, when you share your business’s information across the web using citation listings, Google will reference it as an authority signal (mention) for your website and it can have a positive impact on your organic search ranking performance (as well as the Google local listings).
Acquire relevant and authoritative links to your site’s content.
Acquiring links can be an intensive exercise, however there are several ways to acquire links naturally that doesn’t require spammy activities. The most notable tactic is publishing guest blog posts, which is an activity that can be done at scale. There’s also local directory listings, getting featured on industry link or reference pages and even participating in interviews.
If you feel a bit stuck, you can reference these 60 link building ideas. Link building is a time-intensive activity, so you can always outsource the activity to a specialist link building agency that will be able to acquire links at scale.
Whatever challenges you’ve had in the past with your site’s SEO performance, you can rest assured that the challenges will be overcome with revamped SEO strategies and tactics that are proven to work. The infamous SEO saying, “The best place to hide a dead body is on page 3 of the Google Search Results” no longer needs to apply to your site or your business. Resurrect your site’s SEO performance from the organic search graveyard with these tips in 2018.
