You’ve sent out campaign after campaign with some success, but six months down the line, you feel you’ve exhausted every avenue you could with a client and your link building strategy is coming to a halt. The pressure to build links and improve rankings is on and you are considering doing what you always pride yourself on not doing: black hat SEO.
You know that black hat SEO is very unlikely to help your rankings and very likely to get you penalized. You also know that there is a lot more to effective SEO than gaining backlinks.
In order to expand and diversify your outreach strategy for continued success, keep the following tips in mind:
Focus on on-site SEO
It’s a simple but over-looked solution. Some startups are so bogged down in gaining backlinks they don’t consider how their on-site SEO is impacting rankings.
Each page should be carefully optimized for its keywords, with attention not to “overstuff,” which could see your rankings get demoted.
Consider whether each page offers the content the user would want to see? Does it effectively answer their queries?
Furthermore, are the meta tags saying what they should? Check meta titles, tags and meta descriptions. These should be useful and relevant to your reader, while including your keywords naturally.
Related: 7 Steps to Grow Your Business Through SEO
Investigate UX
Website UX is becoming ever more important. SEO is concerned with giving users the most relevant results, but it doesn’t want to rank a website at the top that is difficult to use or navigate and that is unattractive. Such websites result in high bounce rates and low time spent on page.
A few tips to improve UX include A/B testing your website, gaining and acting on feedback, including a variety of content on your page, making your call-to-actions clear and implementing responsive web design.
Investigate popular but low competition blog topics
Having a blog is great way to attract organic traffic to your website and get your site ranking for its key terms.
Use Google Search Console to see what key terms people are searching for related to your website’s content. This can help you figure out effective blog topics and titles to attract those potential customers searching for those keywords.
Make a note of the top 30 search terms. Have you blogged about these topics? How much general search volume do these words receive per month? Find the ones that are likely to be popular but haven’t already been written about several times, and produce content about them.
Diversify your outreach
Guest blogging can be effective, but it’s a slog. You might contact 30 plus blogs a day with very little success. So, consider new avenues.
A simple way to build links is through journalist requests. You can access these on Twitter (try #HARO, #Journorequest). These consist of journalists and online editors who are seeking comments, usually urgently. You can provide commentary and include a link to your website, which often results in an easily gained link click.
Build content relationships
If you are gaining a lot of traffic from guest blogging on a particular site, it’s worth establishing a regular contributing relationship.
Repeat links arguably won’t do a huge amount for SEO in terms of backlinks. But the resulting traffic and further links from citations make it a strategic move and will help in building relationships.
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Utilize the power of social media
Share your content on social media, as high quality and relevant content will increase traffic to your website.
But, sharing content is not the only way to utilize social media effectively. Use it as a networking tool. Engage in conversation, comment and share other people’s content and start conversations by asking questions.
Outsource
If your SEO work is a one-person (or very small team) operation, seek the assistance of freelancers to help you out. This might not seem cost-effective at first, but once you start outsourcing more content, it will have a positive impact on the success of your outreach.
As you can see, there are many ways to revamp your startup’s stale outreach strategy. It is important to consider what the end goal of your outreach is – backlinking, exposure, engagements, or a mixture of the three? Then you can use any of the above methods to meet your requirements.
