07 Jan What SEO Strategies are Important for Marketers in 2020?

SEO strategies are constantly evolving to match the major search engines’ shifting priorities. If you let your SEO processes stagnate and don’t stay current with modern best practices you’ll find it harder and harder to rank well. The only way to stay at the top of the search is to constantly modify your strategies in order to serve search engines, and the people using them, the most relevant, targeted content possible.

Great Content Remains Critical

Great content is still the bedrock of every successful SEO plan. If you’re not generating unique content that adds something new or something interesting to the current online conversation potential readers won’t have a reason to choose your content over a competitor.

Without strong content, you’re less likely to attract quality backlinks, build a consistent readership, or rank for relevant keywords. In short, without quality content, your entire SEO plan will be negatively impacted.

When generating your content, it’s important to remember who your target audience is and what most interests them about your subject matter. You want to make certain that you’re addressing the questions that the people you’re trying to appeal to are asking.

Build Credibility with Backlinks 

Getting high-value websites to link to your content is still an excellent strategy for establishing your content as an authoritative source for accurate, quality information.

There are a number of specific strategies for collecting backlinks to your content, but the good ones all have one thing in common. They involve creating useful, compelling content and then promoting it to people and publishers that are likely to find it interesting. If your content does a good job of providing the information people are looking for, they will link to it.

Quality backlinks from prominent sources that enjoy favor with search engines tend to create a positive feedback loop. As backlinks are added, your viewership will climb, creating more opportunities for additional backlinks. 

Long-Form Content is More Valuable Than Short-Form 

Given their druthers, most people prefer longer content lengths. Shorter pieces don’t allow the author to adequately address the particulars of the chosen subject matter. At best, short-form content can provide a brief introduction or a hyper-focused answer to one specific element of the topic area. If you want to give your content the best chance at achieving long-term authority, you should focus on creating fewer total articles with longer lengths.

However, the performance of long-form articles is contingent on the thoroughness of the content. If it feels as if it has been padded with redundant or off-topic material then you can’t expect it to generate a sizable audience. People like long-form content because it has the room to offer a complete answer. But when too much of the information feels like fluff, the article’s perceived authority diminishes rapidly.

Make Sure to Track Your Results 

Good SEO practices can do a lot to improve your search rankings, but if you aren’t actively measuring your results you’ll never know what works well and what might be hampering your efforts.

The smart play is to track data points about all aspects of your website using a number of different tools. You could use SEMRush to determine ideal keywords for each new piece of content. Moz adds local search optimization tools, and Google Analytics helps monitor your site’s traffic and general performance.

When you have insight into how specific SEO strategies are helping or hurting your optimization efforts you can refine your practices to further boost performance.

If you follow the recommendations above in 2020 and focus on providing value with every new piece of content your content’s effectiveness will skyrocket, bringing your search rankings along for the ride.