When you hear about improving your website’s ranking, the first thing you likely think of is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Of course, SEO is the main factor with Google rankings, but you also can’t stuff your content with keywords and expect to skyrocket up the rankings. Every company has different SEO digital marketing strategies. However, the best strategies often include a balanced approach to focus on both SEO and optimizing conversions.

Having a high Google ranking is great and is essential from a visibility standpoint. But your Google ranking itself isn’t going to directly lead to more sales. The other component of your search engine marketing strategy needs to be to create engaging content that compels your audience to make a purchase. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to start over from scratch, either. Often times the current content on your website just needs to be tweaked a bit to become more relevant, recognized and optimized for conversions. Here are some tips on how you can use current and new content to make your SEO digital marketing strategy a successful one.

Optimize Old Blog Posts

Every blog post you generate should be relevant at the time of writing. However, even the best pieces will become outdated at some point. Instead of completely scrapping those old blogs and rewriting new ones, consider reworking the content to bring it up to date. Optimizing old blog posts can be effective to reach new audience members or promote an update to an existing product you offer. If you have an extensive portfolio of old blog posts, sometimes a great SEO digital marketing strategy is to recycle those posts instead of reinventing the wheel.

But how do you know which older blog posts to revise and optimize? Many SEO services will provide you with analytics on each blog post to help you determine which ones were most effective when they were originally written. For example, if you have some posts that clearly outperformed others, then those may be the ones you focus on the most. Take a look at how many page views the post got, the bounce rate, the engagement and most importantly, the conversion rate. Sometimes just a little tweaking to your top-performing blog posts can be the best search engine marketing strategy to incorporate.

Use SEO Content To Solve A Customer’s Challenges

Customers typically visit websites to solve a problem or challenge they are dealing with. This is why when you offer a clear and effective solution for your customers, it’s critical to pack your content with SEO terms to make your website easier to find. It’s no secret the top performing websites are the ones that have engaging content and solves challenges customers have. When your website becomes known as a valuable resource for customers to go to, your ranking will steadily improve and your conversion rate will likely increase alongside it.

Link Content To One Another

Both your human audience and Google like things to be convenient for them. The best SEO services will help you optimize each of your blog posts or content pages to link to one another in the most efficient and relevant ways possible. An impactful SEO digital marketing strategy is to think of a group of blog posts that are all related to one another. Then as you write or rewrite each one, include internal links to one another. For example, if you’re in the business of selling vacuum cleaners, you may have one blog post talking about the best vacuum cleaner to use on carpet. Another post may focus on the best vacuum cleaner for picking up pet hair. Since there’s a possibility these two posts relate to the same customer, put an internal hyperlink in each blog to give the reader quick access to read both of them. Not only will your customer appreciate the convenience of being able to solve their problems quickly, but Google will identify the customer’s clicking within your website and improve its ranking as a result.

Target Your Audience In Every Post

One of the mistakes content writers or business owners make is creating content that’s too general. The idea behind this search engine marketing strategy is to attract a broad audience in order to get more visitors. The truth is this strategy creates more work for your visitors to find the relevant information they need to solve their problem. And most people aren’t going to spend that much time on a single website searching for their answers. In other words, if your content is designed to target everyone, then it’s actually not targeting anyone.

While your individual pages of content needs to be targeted to a specific audience, your overall website layout needs to as well. Your landing page should clearly explain what problem you can solve for your audience, and then each page of content the reader clicks on should follow suit. Combine this strong content with a clear call-to-action and you’ll reap the benefits of your SEO digital marketing strategy.

Always Remember The Call-To-Action

You can work with SEO services to have the best content in the world, but it won’t do any good if your potential customers don’t know what to do next. Website visitors shouldn’t have to look very long to find a call-to-action button. You don’t want to make it so large and bold that it’s distracting, but it does need to be clearly recognizable. Whether the call-to-action is for the reader to “book an appointment,” “make a purchase,” or simply to “contact us,” this button is a major influence for driving your reader’s next decision and action, and gives you a greater chance of increasing conversions.

Think Quality Over Quantity With Content

Too many business owners make the mistake of thinking search engine marketing is most effective when you have a large amount of content on your website, regardless of how good the content actually is. The opposite is actually true. While you would benefit from having more content on your website, the quality of it is much more important to your customers and to Google rankings. When visitors on your website don’t stay very long and don’t click on internal links, Google will see it as being a sign your website doesn’t offer much value, which will hurt your ranking.

Incorporate Images Strategically Within Content

Another effective way to keep a visitor on your page longer is to strategically incorporate attractive visuals within the content, especially if there’s a lot of text. If nothing else, images help break up large blocks of text and make it less intimidating for readers. Quality images can also impact your SEO digital marketing strategy. Use images to your advantage to boost your SEO ranking by using attractive captions, alt text, file names and ensure each image adds value to your content. In other words, don’t just add a random picture in the middle of your text because you think it needs one. Your ranking could suffer as a result.

Keywords Should Fit Naturally

Every keyword you use for SEO purposes should fit naturally within the content to make it easier to read. In the past, websites may have gotten away with having a high Google ranking by stuffing content with keywords, but now Google’s algorithm will identify keyword stuffing and penalize you for it. If you aren’t sure if the content on your website flows naturally, try reading it aloud to yourself. You’ll have a better chance of discovering any inconsistencies or unnatural language when you speak it rather than read it. And you can always rely on SEO services to review your website to do a keyword analysis to determine whether you have the proper keyword density.

Seek Advice From A Reputable Digital Marketing Company

The majority of business owners today aren’t SEO digital marketing experts. However, if you own a business with a website, it’s important to know about this concept, or at least work with SEO services to help you. A reputable digital marketing company can take a lot of stress and pressure off of you as a business owner, and then you can focus on other aspects of your business. Learning about Google algorithms, rankings, SEO and everything else that goes into a website is a full-time job itself. Sometimes it’s best to leave this part in the hands of the experts to ensure you’re maximizing your SEO ranking and conversions.

Humble Bear wants to help you grow your business organically in order to create a foundation for sustainability. We aren’t like most other SEO services, since we will take the time to understand your business goals and aspirations, as well as understand your customers in order to help you create engaging, relevant and targeted content. Every SEO digital marketing strategy we develop is based on both short-term and long-term results, depending on our specific client’s needs. When you’re ready to take your business to the next level, contact us for a consultation to see if we are the right fit for your needs.