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SEO, SEO, Marketing

Sustainable SEO: Let’s Talk About It

Bottom Shape

Krista Neher

Dec 13 2022

Sustainable SEO 

SEO has changed a lot over the years. It used to be about “tricking” Google by employing a variety of tactics to signal to it that your site is important. Now, search engines are more sophisticated, so tricking them isn’t a strategy you should rely on.

Most search strategies today are based on creating a website that has an excellent user experience and incorporating content that people searching would find helpful.

Results Over Time

If you are looking for quick results, SEO is not a great tool to choose from. It often takes 6 – 12 months to generate results from search engine optimization efforts.

SEO is about changing (improving) how relevant and important Google thinks your site is for a specific search term or phrase. It can take time to change these perceptions.

SEO is a strategy that should be viewed as a long-term investment. If you execute the strategies and tactics that work, you’ll see results over time.

This isn’t a quick fix or an instant results strategy for digital.

Long-term is about GREAT Content

While there are both strategies and tactics that SEO professionals use to bolster your results, the reality is that in the long term, sustainable SEO is about great content.

Content sends all the right signals to search engines – it shows that you are authoritative and relevant for the topics that you cover.

The key is that just creating content on your site isn’t good enough. The content has to generate traffic, social shares, and most importantly links for Google to view it as important in search results.

More and more businesses are focused on creating relevant content that others share and talk about to build a sustainable SEO strategy. To achieve this, we’ve seen a shift in focus from the volume of content to the quality of content. If you create a lot of content that people don’t share, it won’t drive results. Creating a few pieces of great content that get significant results is the more sustainable path to success.

Less Keyword-Focused

We still talk about keywords in SEO because it’s difficult to create a strategy around phrases and questions, but Google is becoming less reliant on them.

As Google has become more sophisticated, it does a better job at understanding the intent of a search and connecting the searcher with relevant content.

Strategies like keyword stuffing are not very effective. You do still need to use words and phrases that signal to Google what your website is about, but keywords alone aren’t the ticket to success.

Big Idea:

Some people think that there is a link between spending money advertising on Google and organic search engine rankings. There isn’t. Google has explicitly stated this, and many search experts have independently validated it.

Mobile is Now

Over 50% of searches happen on mobile devices, which means that every aspect of your SEO strategy must be optimized for mobile.

Specifically, this means making sure that your website is mobile-friendly and also loads quickly. Google will reduce the visibility in search results of websites that load slowly.

Voice is the Future

This kind of search will be the next frontier in digital marketing, and specifically in search. Voice devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are gaining market share, but also more and more people rely on voice searches from their mobile phones.

The challenge with voice search for marketers is that only one result is typically shared in voice search results. This means that the competition to rank first will be even greater.

SEM and SEO

SEO and SEM are sometimes used interchangeably, but they refer to two different aspects of search engine marketing.

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, and it includes both paid search and organic search. Paid search is ads that you pay to display on Google. SEO is often referred to as organic search, and it focuses on increasing the authority and relevance of your website so that it naturally ranks towards the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

As you can see in the image below, search engine results consist of both paid and organic. In general, about 80% of clicks go to organic results and 20% of clicks go to paid.

 

Many businesses use both paid and organic as a part of their strategy. Even if you rank first organically for a term, 20% of the clicks could go to your competitors who advertise. For this reason, search ads are often purchased for important terms, even if the business ranks first organically.

Learn about earning Master Certification in Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and SEO [HERE]

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