What are the most effective SEO tactics?

There are so many different tactics that make up a part of SEO, each with different levels of importance and effectiveness. As SEO is always evolving, so to should your tactics and strategy. If you don’t evolve with the times then you will quickly be left behind in the dust.

The tactics you deploy don’t need to be overly complicated or confusing either. And if you are tackling SEO yourself then you shouldn’t attempt anything you don’t fully understand in order to avoid critical mistakes that can be very costly on your ranking.

The tactics listed below can be implemented easily and quickly to ensure you are keeping up with the best practices and latest trends of 2018. Take a look below at the top SEO tactics for 2018:

Tactic 1: improve user experience

What are the challenges that every web designer faces today
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User experience has never been more important. SEO now just isn’t solely about pleasing Google in order to get a good ranking, you also need to ensure users have a great experience when they are on your website.

Many people don’t actually realise how many benefits there are when it comes to improving your user experience and integrating it in with SEO. Take a look below at some of the main benefits:

  • Improves website content
  • Helps to speed up the user buying cycle
  • Improves the click through rate by specifically targeting the user
  • Assists in discovering new keyword areas that are best to target
  • Improves the goal completions as well as your overall sales
  • Helps to encourage more website testing and overall improvements

Tactic 2: capitalise on local SEO

Local SEO for businesses
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Local SEO has been around for a little while now and it is become more and more important, no matter the type of business you run. It is essential that you capitalise on local SEO through the use of keywords like “near me” or “close by”.

These days, there are a lot of people using those keywords to search for any given product or service. For example, if you were looking for a local Thai restaurant you would probably search “thai restaurant near me”.

To put it simply, there has been dramatic growth in people searching for these types of terms, so you need to ensure that your local SEO game is on point in order to get the most out of people searching for these terms.

But how do you actually go about applying this tactic? Well, there are a number of different effective ways to do this. Firstly, you revisit your old content. Take a close look at your blog and/ or your service pages and smoothly integrate the local search keywords into your content.

As well as revisiting old content you should also create new content around these search terms. Blogs are a particularly great way to showcase your local SEO tactics. For example, “how to choose the best Thai food place near you” or even “comparing the best Thai places near you”.

Tactic 3: don’t only think about keywords

think not only think about keywords
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Instead you also need to think about the topic areas you want to focus on. There are a few reasons as to why you should expand your focus. Firstly, recent Google updates showed increasingly high levels of speculation in terms of pages that have overly targeted keywords/ search terms.

As well as this, user expectations have changed and they now require more in depth levels of content. They don’t want to have to keep clicking around your website until they find what they are looking for, they want it all in the one place.

Lastly, high ranking and performing content tends to be longer and incorporates different content types and usually increases the chance of sharing and other link signals.

Therefore, it is important that you think of a highly engaging topic and let the keywords flow naturally, rather than building content based on only the keywords you want to use.

Tactic 4: don’t panic when issues arise

don’t panic when issues arise with SEO
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It will almost never be smooth sailing in SEO, so therefore it is important that you don’t panic if there is a bump in the road. It is vital that when there is an issue you look for ways to expand and overcome – not shrink your website.

For example, if you receive a backlink penalty it is the first instinct to remove those backlinks (usually through Google’s disavow tool). While this is true, you also need to remember that you are losing some of your backlinks so you then need to work on increasing your backlink number, just to quality sites.

Another example comes from when there is a full redesign of a website. People think that a new design means that they need all new content. This isn’t always necessarily the case. Most of the time the content is still good to go on your new site.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
Executive Editor at Best in Australia. Mike has spent over a decade covering news related to business leaders and entrepreneurs around Australia and across the world. You can contact Mike here.
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