Before you begin to strategize your SEO efforts, you’ll want to make sure there are no competitors in the area you want to rank in. If you’re building a local business or launching a product or service in a specific city, you’ll want to make sure that it’s the only available source for information on the topic.
In addition to maintaining a solid profile on all of the relevant social media sites, you should also conduct thorough research to uncover any potential competitors, this can be as simple as using your favorite search engine and reviewing your competitors’ websites.
You should also consider hiring toronto seo expert to conduct a competitor analysis for you while this may be overkill for a small business owner or blogger, it may be necessary for a professional service provider in the case of an established company competing for a highly sought-after niche.
Follow the Rules
SEO is a highly competitive industry it’s important to pay close attention to the rules to ensure you stay competitive in your market.
One of the most important rules is to choose a keyword research method that accurately reflects your company or product. There are a number of different keyword research methods that you can use to uncover the best keywords for your business, some of the most popular methods include:
- Keyword research tools
- Keyword research blogs
- Keyword research forums
- Keyword research videos
- Keyword research white papers
It’s also important to remember to use the most relevant long-tail keywords when you’re writing your content, one common mistake that business owners make is to only use broad, short-tail keywords.
They assume that long-tail keywords will perform just as well, if not better but this is not the case. In fact, long-tail keywords may perform about 20% as well as their shorter counterparts.
Be Flexible and Adaptable
An important aspect of succeeding in the SEO industry is maintaining a flexible mindset, this is one of the most important skills you can have as an SEO professional.
You’ll likely have periods of time when your site is performing well, with lots of organic traffic flowing in from search engines but at other times, you may experience a dip in your organic traffic, which can happen for a variety of reasons.
It’s important to be able to adapt your strategy so that you can capitalize on the traffic when it’s there, while also establishing a solid foundation for your business so that when traffic falls, you don’t fall with it.
Track Your Results and Make Changes
The best SEO strategies don’t last forever, they’re created with the goal of generating more traffic in mind, so they’re designed to produce results over the short term, but no strategy is perfect, and your best efforts to optimize your site will eventually start to lose their effectiveness.
As your search engine rankings start to slip, you’ll want to analyze the situation and make adjustments as necessary.
One of the first things you’ll want to do is track your traffic and conversions, you can use a number of different tools and resources to track your metrics. It’s also a good idea to figure out the sources of your traffic and track the keywords they’re using to find your site.
If you notice that a certain group of keywords is consistently resulting in low organic traffic, you may want to adjust your keyword research strategy to target those keywords.
