I was recently asked by CEO Blog Nation to provide an answer to the following question as they were writing an article on it:
“What is your best SEO tip for an SME?”
Having worked in SEO for a number of years, particularly with SMEs, I was more than happy to provide my thoughts. I just had one slight issue – how do you give just one answer?
Of course, I knew the article was also being answered by others from within the industry to give a more rounded list, but SEO isn’t now, nor has it ever been, a single action or event. In fact, only a few days earlier I had actually read a list of over 200 actionable SEO tips put together by ahrefs. Clearly, choosing one single piece of advice was going to be tricky.
At Miro, we work with clients across a wide variety of industries and no two campaigns have ever been exactly the same, which means what is important for one client isn’t necessarily important for another.
So How Would I Choose What My Top Tip Would Be?
Well, I would have to consider this at a much broader level.
Looking at is as simply as possible, SEO is split into the following two areas:
From there you have two or three major subsections:
It is with this image in mind that I pulled out the aspect of SEO that is perceived to be one of the most difficult, building links to your website from others, something that comes under off-site links.
What Do We Know About Links?
We all know that links play an important factor in website rankings. A website that has plenty of high quality, relevant links pointing to it is going to perform much better than one with fewer links or lots of links that are of low quality.
Amy Kilvington of Naturally Content highlighted a key aspect of link building by discussing the value that they hold as her top tip in the CEO Blog Nation article:
Value of Links
“My first tip relates to links. Contrary to common belief, not all links are
valuable. Incoming links are great, of course, but when they’re irrelevant,
paid for or derive from a dodgy domain, you risk penalisation.”
Another important point to recognise is the difference between Do-Follow and No-Follow. Wesley Flippo shared some valuable advice on this:
Do-Follow and No-Follow
“When a trying to build your backlink profile, look for websites that use the
‘Do-Follow’ HTML code (rel=do-follow) when linking to other sites. Backlinks
that have rel=no-follow tag are not counted by Google’s robots and will
not help your rankings.”
So How Do We Get These High-Quality, Do-Follow Links?
The answer lies quite simply in the outreach. And this is what I based my top tip around.
I’m sure most people within the SEO industry are sick of the phrase, “Content is king”. I know I am because quite simply, it is not true.
How many pieces of content do you think are created on a daily basis? Millions? And how many platforms do your consumers interact with your brand? Probably dozens.
So you’ve got to fight your way through all these millions of brand new posts, across multiple platforms to get your message to your consumers and potential customers. If you don’t then your content, and the time and resource invested in it, will just fall into the bottomless black hole of the internet, never to be seen again.
I Think We Need A Strategy
Before you create any piece of content you should consider the purpose of it, who is going to read it, who is going to want to read it and then work out how you deliver it to these people.
“Of all the places a person could conceivably interact with your brand, your website is the one that will have the least traffic.”
Unfortunately, it is still not uncommon to see a business create an article, put it on their blog and then get disappointed when it doesn’t return the results they wanted.
To solve this you need to find the best ways to put your content in front of your audience.
After you have created your content you should look to follow these simple steps to outreach it and in return build some high-quality do-follow links:
- Put it on your blog
- Promote it on social media
- Send it out in your next email newsletter
- Talk to people within your industry and tell them about it
- Talk to influencers within your industry and ask them to promote it
- Find relevant websites that already discuss a similar topic and talk to them about it.
- You could even run a paid campaign around it – not always relevant for a simple blog post, but certainly worth considering for other forms of content.
Networking is something that a lot of businesses do on a daily basis to help promote their business, so why not take that approach and go digital with it?
If you manage to form some relationships and build some good quality links you might just find that you push yourself up the rankings and gain more visits to your website and grow your business.
After all, isn’t that what you wanted from your SEO strategy?
And Finally…
Although all the tips on CEO Blog Nations post are highly relevant and incredibly useful, one of the most valuable is made by Katie Birkbeck at Blue Corona – optimise for mobile.
Optimize for Mobile
“Optimize for mobile. I know most business owners are tired of hearing this
SEO tip, but it needs to be repeated. Users are increasingly searching for
services via their smartphones, and Google ranks websites in the mobile
results based on whether a website is mobile-friendly or not.”
Even if your website doesn’t receive much mobile traffic, the places that you outreach to might and if it doesn’t look good on the platform they are viewing it on, you aren’t going to secure that link!
