#1 Focus on the right keywords

When we first started our SEO efforts we went after every keyword out there that had a decent search volume. What we found pretty quickly is that it wasn’t as much about the search volume as it is about intent.

We noticed that some keywords that would bring a ton of traffic, wouldn’t bring in a lot of business, while others didn’t bring in a lot of traffic, and were responsible for bringing in a lot of business. This made us realize that we needed to refocus our content campaign on “revenue keywords.” Just getting traffic wasn’t going to do, we needed to target keywords that have the highest potential of bringing revenue in order to see an ROI on our SEO efforts.

Many new websites make this mistake. So my advice would be to pinpoint the queries that are used by customers in your industry that are at the tail end of the shopping process and do this early on. This will give you the revenue boost necessary at the beginning stages so that you can use those gains to reinvest in a more aggressive content marketing/SEO campaign.

#2 Clean up your internal link profile

My last SEO “aha” moment was the influence your internal link profile has on your search engine rankings. Recently we decided to clean up our SEO top to bottom, and part of that effort was cleaning up our internal link profile.

What we did was finding a set of keywords for each page and didn’t deviate from the specified anchor text, to make sure we are consistent with the information that is pointing to that particular page. Within a few weeks of doing this, we found our rankings increasing for each of those pages, specifically for those target keywords. Normally internal linking is seen as a small factor, but it had a huge impact on our website rankings.

Andy Crestodina

Co-Founder / Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media Studios

1. Be the best among the best

If you haven’t created one of the top 10 best pieces of content on your topic, don’t expect to rank on page one.

You should believe in your content that much. Of course, making a great page is critical, but insufficient. You still need to do the SEO basics. Each of these aligns with a key search ranking factor.

1. Validate that you have a chance for ranking for your target keyphrase (competition and authority)
2. Use the target phrase and the semantically related phrases in the usual ways (keywords and relevance)
3. Format the content so it’s scannable, visual and keeps visitors on the page after they click (user-interaction signals)

So yes, optimize your content for search, but don’t expect any results unless you’re ready to stand up and make the case that your page is better than all the others.
If you do that, the search engines are trying to help you. If you don’t do that, the search engines are trying to stop you.

2. Write less. Rewrite more.

Write less. Rewrite more. That was a revelation for me. After many years of creating new content, I finally realized that I had a lot of URLs that were credible, but the content was old. So I started rewriting old articles and the results have been great.

I watch to see which posts are declining in rank, which posts almost rank high and which posts have a lot of inbound links. Then I review them for quality. If any of these are less than amazing, I rewrite them. Then I watch the rank climb. Works like a charm.

I’m not the only one who has discovered this trick. Our annual blogger survey found that 38% of content creators are updating older articles. And those that do are twice as likely to report “strong results” from their blogs.