Applying wrong and outdated SEO strategies will not only harm your rankings but can also impact your traffic and conversions. The key difference is that SEO focuses on optimizing pages to rank better through organic traffic. This refers to site visitors coming from search engines such as Google or Bing. Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to improve search engine rankings.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

You can also share content, updates, and offers on a GBP,” says Levy. “The reality of link building is that when going white hat, it’s a lot like PR. If you’re running a guest posting campaign, for example, you need to pitch ideas that are going to resonate with the blogger or journalist on the other end of the SEO Anomaly email,” says Rubright. “There are tons of ways to improve your email pitch, but a problem many link-building pitches have is that they don’t consider the blogger or journalist’s audience. They’ll blast out email templates with generic guest posting ideas in hopes of a response, playing the numbers game,” says Rubright.

That way, you can focus 100% on content… without having to worry about keywords, H2 tags, alt text and other on-page SEO stuff. The 5th step in this SEO tutorial is to keyword-optimize your content. This step is also where you write titles and descriptions that make people want to click on your result… even when you don’t rank #1. For example, some time ago I wanted to rank for the keyword “local SEO”.

Get more views by researching what people search for on YouTube. I also recommend manually looking over your sitemap just to double-check that all of your site’s pages are listed here. You enter your domain into it… and the tool will scan your site for technical SEO problems. But the problem with a tool like Screaming Frog is that it doesn’t dive into what the problem is or how to fix it.

Before starting the hiring process, determine why you’re hiring an SEO specialist in the first place. Google Keyword Planner, a free tool, can also help you search for words or phrases related to your products or services. To stay ahead of the constantly evolving algorithms and industry trends, you can read about them through industry-leading blogs covering SEO and marketing topics.

To get visible benefits in the long run, you need to constantly adjust your SEO strategy and adopt the newest SEO factors and practices. Search engine algorithms help present more advanced search results for users based on the purpose of their search. Thus, creating SEO-friendly content with these factors in mind can significantly boost your search results. Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers. Most of the voice search optimization strategies also make sense for semantic search.

Add “What is X” Definitions to Blog Content

The more commonalities between pages, the higher the probability that a given subtopic is important to the searchers. There’s an interesting analysis of the “coffee” keyword by Kayle Larkin. I highly recommend it if you want to get a hint on how to spot these kinds of opportunities. We’ll talk about search intent more in the next step of this guide. Usually, searchers either want to learn something, buy something, or find a specific website.

Why Link Building is Important

• One of my favorite features in Clearscope is how it shows you exactly which pages are losing traffic.
• SEO courses can help you learn how to optimize websites and content to improve visibility in search engines and attract more organic traffic.
• This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking.
• For SEO purposes, it’s recommended to think strategically about your alt text and try to include some keywords to give your site an extra push.
• Which told me that people searching for “local SEO” didn’t want a list of tips, a case study… or any other content format.

Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around. It’s just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency. Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.