There are thousands of tactics that can be deployed to any given search engine optimisation (SEO) objective, but how many can you truly rely on? Out of those that spring to mind, how many can be based on tried and tested techniques suitable for repeatable gains?
My goal is to provide you with outcomes that can be repeated on most SEO projects to encourage better results from your efforts. I also want to share some insights gathered from 14+ years of practical search experience, covering hundreds of digital marketing campaigns and recognised business industries.
The fundamentals
In the book Tactical SEO: The Theory and Practice of Search Marketing, my intention is to help businesses to get out of the ever-changing blog mentality for delivering SEO as a solution, and to move towards a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of SEO, and repeating wins.
With an industry like SEO that moves so fast, it can be a challenge to keep on top of the search environment, let alone take a step back and consider the bigger picture, but this ‘one eye forward, one eye back’ mentality is important for refining approaches, and making the most out of expertise.
A downside to the ‘blog approach’ to managing SEO campaigns, is that you are always behind the curve, chasing the latest opportunity, often restricting any real strategy of bigger picture awareness, or understanding.
The fundamentals of Google (I am not suggesting that Google is the only search engine to be optimised for, but it certainly leads the way with the rate of evolution, and setting best practice) are fairly consistent, and have always included factors like:
- Universal access to information
- Expedient results
- Putting the user and their experience first
The above is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it provides some context of where we are going with tactics/techniques that work.
The tactics
Before applying these tactics to every SEO project you undertake, it’s important to remember that the strategy and actions used must be aligned towards business needs/objectives, and incorporate the unique company/website/entity circumstances (basic SWOT analysis and situational analysis).
To show the logic behind the tactics, below you can see the previous fundamentals of Google, yet this time I’m applying another level of strategy to them, to show the overarching impact areas (again not an exhaustive list), which we will expand on with proven tactics and techniques used.
- Universal access to information
- Technical improvements
- Crawling/indexation
- Uptime / availability / operability
- Content
- Expedient results
- Mobile optimisation
- Site speed
- Content Types
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Putting the user and their experience first
- Bounce rates / exits
- Engagement
- Click Through Rate optimisation (CTR) / positioning
- Content (creation, matching, pitching, more)
Note: a core item omitted from the above and radiating through all of this, is data. For example, Vertical Leap – the leading provider of search and digital marketing – places deep data at heart of our decision making; it drives insight, actions, and decision making.
As a data ethos, a core, primary stage of any digital decision-making approach should include gathering as much relevant data as possible, before jumping into change (other than fixing what’s broken and associated essential actions).
Source: Data driven SEO – Vertical Leap
Techniques that work (but often get overlooked)
Now we get to the part where we talk practical actions that work. Below are three of my favourite techniques that work, but frequently get overlooked for SEO/search gains.
1 – Identifying new content that works
Sounds simple, but so much of the content that gets created fails to deliver towards objectives, and an important aspect of that is the failure to spend enough time in the planning stages, identifying the right (and most effective) content for the project in the first place.
There are some great free resources and information areas that can be used to help facilitate creating the right content including:
- Google Search Console (GSC) query data
- Google Answers & Knowledge panel
- Competitor analysis
- com
- Repurposing existing content
…and a few extra tips for creating content that works:
- Repeat successes – this could be topics that have already delivered results, questions you have answered, problems solved, and other areas, such as turning successful blog posts into videos, infographics, or other forms of interactive content types.
- Measure, monitor, and improve – all too often new content gets one chance to succeed – within the first few weeks of the content being added to the website. This removes any opportunity to use new data to improve content, expand it, or build momentum behind it. Lack of visitors does not always mean the content has failed, it may just need a little bit of data driven refinement.
2 – Take a paid approach to organic adverts
SEO success is regularly restricted in terms of results due to isolated working. The more SEO becomes the integration champion for total website success, the greater you will see organic search improvements.
The single quickest, and very much overlooked, SEO technique for success is taking a paid approach to organic adverts.
Practically, this means:
- Making minor changes to adverts and tracking impact
- Refining adverts frequently based on data driven decision-making and insights
- Giving organic adverts more meaning outside of just inserting keywords into title tags
- Regularly challenging the best performing adverts for next levels of wins
- Tracking metrics for adverts outside of the highest impression and traffic pages, for benchmarking and improving total site CTR
- Putting the user intent at the foreground, over potential ranking value of key terms
Getting more value from all the current visibility, and incorporating the user more at point of advert will deliver results.
3 – Re-prioritising technical SEO
Technical SEO pops in and out of website prioritisation and strategy, but very rarely gets deployed effectively, with a sound business case and expected business impact. Here’s a few examples of technical SEO actions that you can implement to deliver direct results:
- Fixing broken links – there will be pages that are currently showing a 404 header status on most websites, thus leading to lost traffic. If you have thousands to fix, prioritise them. This will redirect any new/lost traffic to your website
- Loading content faster – look at your most important pages on your website (this could be ROI pages, ranking pages, informational pages etc.) and make them render as quick as possible. This will reduce pogo sticking (*back and forth to search results), improve other user quality signals, and support total site success online
- Listening to your users: technical fixes are more than just functional. Look at technical SEO to technically improve your website for your users and search. Tracking clicks, monitoring events and even tracking eye movements, can all tell you what needs to technically change to improve your websites performance, which is equally tied to user feedback – quality metrics are core for search and user progress
- Replacing linkable content: most sites have broken pages that attract links, some even large volumes of links. Links are a ranking factor, and by identifying and fixing removed content that provides links, referral traffic and search gains, you will see performance progress.
Departing thoughts…
Whilst I have focused on a few areas that I know will deliver repeated wins for many SEO strategies, this is really just a tiny insight into a much bigger value (and user-based) approach to delivering SEO, due to the fundamentals of search and keeping an eye on the bigger picture too.
Please feel free to share with any thoughts, feedback or tactics that work for you.
