There are a lot of components that make up a successful SEO campaign. Onsite SEO, off-site SEO, content marketing, keyword analysis, co-citation, earning links...and the list goes on. It can be a bit much! Watch the video on Best SEO Advice to learn what to do to be successful in SEO.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our best SEO advice video. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer with me as well.
Good afternoon, Chad. There's a lot of folks out there searching for expert SEO tips and tricks, trying to get the best advice they can in their pursuit to page one top rankings. So I thought maybe we'd talk a little bit and try to help the cause today-- put our two cents in on this discussion. Was the best SEO advice that Semify can offer?
I think the best SEO advice is to start with keywords that matter. And whether you've done your homework and looked at competitors using a tool like our web grader or you're running a paid search campaign, you want to make sure that the keywords are picking are actually going to have a meaningful impact if you get those rankings on your business.
I think that's a good point. Because it takes a long time to make SEO work. But I would put one caveat in there, and we've talked about this in a lot of our onsite SEO video blogs. And the people searching for best SEO advice are probably just starting out. One danger with picking lofty keywords is that they take so long, you'll probably get discouraged and give up before you should. So while I think long-term, your strategy is right, I also say for that SEO beginner, pick a few really easy targets just to show yourself how this works and get a little excited. You can actually rank something. So it's sort of a double-edged strategy there.
Good point. And the next thing in terms of best SEO advice that I would offer is to make sure that you understand early the marriage and relationship between on-site and off-site SEO. Because both are true. You can't just write content on your website and expect to accomplish great rankings, and you can't just build links off your website and expect to get great rankings. You need to do both in order to really get success from an SEO program.
And it's surprising to me how many people have a hard time grasping this concept. We say all the time that onsite SEO is necessary but not sufficient, but yet we find people who are out trying to do link building and really haven't focused on building meaningful content. It seems like they weren't paying attention to the part where we said it was necessary.
Then we see folks on the flip side who are pouring their hearts out into onsite content, even doing great content marketing on their site, but suffer from very low domain authority and have not appropriately marketed, syndicated, created buzz, or done any backlink activity. And so they're in the "it's not sufficient" category, and it's really troubling. The reality is you have to orchestrate both these activities to be congruent. They're both in the algorithm.
You could read blog after blog. You can ask for expert advice over and over again. And everyone will tell, you need both. There has to be congruency. So that the page on your site that's about something is well-tuned around those keywords that it's targeted. And the off-site activities that are generating referral links and buzz and backlinks and footprint, any social media needs to point to that page. And all that has to come together to make rankings really work.
It's no wonder people are looking for SEO advice, because there really is. It's tough to get the right mix and to make it work. But once you understand it and put in place, it can definitely-- you get great results.
The final point I wanted to make is that once you have picked the keywords and you have executed your on-site and off-site strategy, you want to make sure that you track everything you're doing. And that starts with the rankings, and then it goes to visits to your website. But most importantly, you want to make sure that you're really measuring the leads you're getting from the website, both in terms of people filling out web forms as well as calling you.
And it's something that we recently did a couple guest blog posts on, but really tracking those phone calls is a critical part of SEO. Because a lot of small businesses get up to 50% of the response from the website is coming in off of phone calls. So if you're not tracking that, you're not tracking those other things, you're going to give up. Because you're not see the results are actually are really happening there.
That's outstanding SEO advice, and it's Six Sigma 101. Every project needs to be trackable. You need to have metrics that define success. And probably the people who are searching for best SEO advice aren't necessarily really ready to hear what you're saying, Chad. Because they're probably still in the mindset-- if I could only figure out this one special HTML tag or alt or title or some other technical aspect of my site, my rankings would just zoom to the top.
And I think what you're saying is right on the money. It isn't really about that. The best seo advice is that you have to step back and see the project. And it's long term, has to be measured, and you need to have that feedback loop. And realize you're going to be doing this for a while. And again, once you understand and gain that perspective, then you'll really be satisfied with the investment you make in SEO and the return on the investment it gives you.
But if you get too far into the minutia, you don't measure, you miss some of those leads that are coming in through phone calls, or don't track appropriately the ones coming in through contact forms-- it's funny to me just how a few leads can change the calculus of the money you might spend on SEO marketing. Just a few per month. And if you're not catching those, you might end up with the wrong conclusion.