4 SEO Strategies Brookfielders Can Throw Out Right Now....And Replace With These

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about search engine optimization, it’s that you can never rest on your laurels. What once worked like a charm to keep your website ranked and highly trafficked no longer does. Many of us have learned this the hard way.

What SEO strategies are working? The things I outline below. Change your mindset, lose the old tactics, and bring on the new ones I suggest here.

1. SEO is about lots of backlinks

One of the first things people ask me when creating a marketing plan for their new business and website is how to get those backlinks I keep talking about. Back in the day, the amount of backlinks a website had had a direct relationship with rankings and website visibility. With the new( ish) Google updates over the past few years, Panda and Penguin, that ship has sailed. Google no longer looks for quantity of backlinks, rather, in their quest to up the quality of search results, they look instead for quality backlinks. Relevant backlinks.

When the SEO company JC Penny hired got canned back in 2010 for the black hat tactics of backlinking to every site they could get their hot little hands on, despite the fact that there was no relevancy whatsoever to their products, the company was given the boot and JC Penny suffered for quite some time.

Note to selves: make sure your backlink building strategy is honest and relevant. No one will ever buy that Taiwanese chopsticks Inc. is really interested in commenting on your car repair blog. Comment, and send your content to high authority blogs and websites, and make common sense relationships with them. This is what Google looks for these days and will reward you for. Quality, not quantity.

2. More Pages, and More Content, is good SEO practice

In keeping with the quality vs. quantity theme, be advised that the same Google algorithm change talked about above, Panda, targeted, and pinged sites with low quality content. Such sites got penalized, and their search traffic dropped. It had nothing to do with how much content was there but rather the quality content, which you can read more about here.

Rather than making yourself crazy creating more more more, concentrate instead on the type of content your ideal client will click into and respond to. Often times these days this is video, or audio, which has limited amounts of copy. That’s not to say that along with this content you shouldn’t be adding accompanying keyword rich text, whether it is in the form of a transcript, or long-tailed keyword phrases. And of course, if your ideal audience responds to images, which so many do, remember to include alt text, or the search engines won’t be able to find it at all.

Note to selves: Don’t create hundreds of pages; rather, create high quality content

3. Use many different types of content

One of the top complaints that I hear from harried business owners is the idea that they have to be everywhere, doing everything, implementing all the newest bells and whistles as they emerge, or they will be left behind in the game, and that their SEO will suffer.

Note to selves: This can’t be further from the truth. Although there are some basic platforms that you can’t ignore these days (yes, you must have a website if you want to be taken seriously. Really- stop asking that question) it is your job as a business owner to have done your homework, taken your surveys, watching and paying attention to your analytics, and from this your answers will come. So yes, at first you will need to test many platforms to get a good scope of the analytics. Then, as your audience slowly becomes defined, and you begin to see what is bringing them into your site, what is making them click, where they are coming from offsite, you will begin to narrow your platforms and maximize the chosen ones.

Point of fact: if your services are catering to a 65+ age group- say you are an elder care masseuse, Twitter may not be your social media platform of choice.

4. Higher Rankings Means More Traffic

You finally made it to the top of page 1 of Google! Congratulations! But alas…your phone is not ringing, your contact page sits dejected and lonely, and your website is not a-buzz with traffic. What’s the deal?

Just because you are finally ranking high for your keywords does not necessarily mean your click through rate is high as well. Why? Could be a few reasons but chances are the biggest one is that there isn’t a lot of search volume for the keywords you are targeting.

So just as it is important to define your ideal client, it is just as important to target what terms your ideal client is putting into their browser bar to find you.

Do you know what that is? 

I’m going to save you some pain, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these days that is hard to find from your Google Analytics unless you dig further. Unless you are paying for Google Adwords, Google no longer shows your top search queries and keywords. Bummer, and it irks me to no end, but that is the way it is.

The good news is that there is a work around, and that is in your Google Webmaster Tools. If you use Google Analytics you can access your Webmaster tools from within GA. Follow along:

• log into your Google Analytics account and click on your website URL to view your report.
• Once in the dashboard, click on the navigation option “Acquisition”, and then click on “Search engine optimization” and then click on “Queries”. You should now see a screen that looks something like this:

To see where you need to go to get this crucial info and step by step instructions on what to look for once you’re there, come in here