Successful SEO has seven key steps, per MOZ’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO“. These are valuable ways to help your website be discoverable by new users by ranking high in Search Engine Results Pages.
Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
Enabling search engines to find and index my site
Compelling content that answers the searchers query
The site needs to answer questions in an interesting and engaging way.
Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
Be thoughtful with the composition of the website so that relevant keywords are featured in the articles
Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
The site needs to be streamlined so that it loads quickly, yet also has an interesting and engaging design
Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
Content that engages your audience enough that they feel compelled to share it.
Title, URL, and description to draw high Click-Through Rates in the rankings
Thoughtfully considering article titles, the site’s URL, and description to make it compelling to someone, seeing it in a search, is very interested in clicking on the link and coming to the page.
Snippet/scheme markup to stand out in SERPs
Make the additional comments that show up on the Search Results Page engaging and encouraging the viewer to click over to the site.
I just stumbled on Chris Chalmers (via this video, of all things). Chris was a DJ on a couple of local (Seattle) radio stations. Having helped many folks with their digital presence, I fully get what he’s talking about in this video. Short-term marketing, much less short-term thinking, doesn’t work. Not in the long run at least.
Marketing should be a well thought out and well planned element of your business. Strategic thought, analytics, and deliberate execution all play a part in building the long-term business.
I’ve seen too many folks expect a website, Twitter/Facebook/Instagram account to come in and rain money. 9 times out to 10 (99 times out of 100?) it’s not going to work. Regular focused posts, thoughtful interaction and the well timed/placed promotion are what gets you there. You should consider this to be a multi-year long initiative.
