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Content + Links: How to Build the Perfect SEO Strategy
Every successful business needs a great SEO campaign, and link building combined with content marketing are the most important pieces of the puzzle. Without an SEO strategy, you won’t be able to climb the ranks of search engine search results (SERPs), which means your business will fail to attract hundreds (or thousands) of potential users. It’s been known for many years that the first page of Google results gets the vast majority of clicks, sometimes more than 90% of the total. If you want your website to bring in conversions, you’ll need to find creative ways to stand out and rank higher.
Create Video Content
Content marketing has been called the future of advertising, and if you want to reach your target audience, you’ll need to get on board. Essentially, content marketing is any original content you create that showcases your products or services. Video content immediately comes to mind since so many businesses use commercials on TV and video ads online to sell their products. Content marketing goes beyond traditional advertising campaigns, however.
You could create your own YouTube videos showcasing lesser-known or complex applications of your products, providing tutorials for topics you’re most frequently questioned about, or showing testimonials from a target demographic you’re trying to reach. Video content is constantly becoming more valuable, especially since video is predicted to account for 82% of all web traffic by next year.
Engage Your Audience
Of course, there are other forms of content marketing like infographics and images, as well as articles and blog posts. You can find the types of websites your target audience frequents and post all kinds of content to these sites to reach them. Content that attracts customers generally meets the following criteria.
Informative: Naturally, your audience needs to learn something about your services and your company so they can decide if they’re interested. Instead of just telling them what you do, you could tell them how you do it in order to stand out from others in your niche.
Personal: One of the easiest ways to stand out in potential customers’ minds is to offer them a personalized experience. This could be through stories of relatable experiences or through inspiring people to action. The famous “Share a Coke” campaign is a great example of this. The personalized bottles make customers feel closer to the product, and the campaign’s strong call to action ensures that customers share their experience with others.
Valuable: Every product has to have value to customers, whether it’s practical or emotional, and your content needs to demonstrate this. A business selling motorcycle gear, for example, might post to blogs for motorcycle enthusiasts detailing how their equipment offers the best safety and comfort. A software company offering customer management programs could make videos showing how their software simplifies processes compared to their competitors.
Build High-Quality Links
To really start rising through search engine rankings, you’ll need a portfolio of healthy backlinks. Also called inbound links, these are links on other websites that lead to your own site. Getting more of these on high authority sites increases your own Domain Authority (DA), making it easier to rank. DA is a score ranging from 1-100 that predicts how well your site with rank in SERPs.
You can check any website’s DA online for free, so it’s possible to find similar sites with high authority and produce guest content for them to earn backlinks. The broken-backlink method is a popular one where you find non-functioning links on other sites, contact the webmaster, and suggest a link to your own site to replace the broken one. You can also create internal links within your own site to easily guide users to other sections and improve their experience overall.
For the best results combining content creation and link-building, it’s a good idea to contact experts like SERPtheory. Communities like this have years of SEO experience and are constantly collecting the latest information on this ever-changing practice. They can help you ensure you’re following best practices in all of your SEO efforts, so you can climb the ranks without having to worry about potential penalties from Google algorithms.