SEO changes quickly. Using the most ‘popular’ techniques that are also good for your long-term strategy is essential for competing in searches. In this video, Gwen Beren, CEO of Illuminous Markeitng, Inc. discusses SEO best practices for Q4 2021 that will boost your web presence.
Video Transcription
Speaker – Gwen Beren:
Hey, Gwen Beren, CEO of Illuminous Marketing and partner in the Click Collective agency. Today, we are going to talk about which SEO techniques are popular. And it is Q4 2021 right now, and as you may know, SEO changes rapidly. So let’s get into it and talk about what’s popular right now.
Optimizing Web Page Content
Now, one fundamental building block of SEO that probably will always be the same is making sure that your web page content is optimized properly. And so what does that include? That includes making sure that your content is written for people and not search engines. That includes making sure that you have keywords included in your page titles, your headings, your webpage content, and that you’re speaking to the user about how your services or your product can benefit them. That’s the most important thing that I see people miss is that they talk too much about themselves and they don’t talk enough to the user about how their life will be better for having come to your website or your web property.
So that is the first thing that you want to do is to make sure that your webpage content is SEO optimized.
Matching searcher’s intent with your page content
You all also want to make sure along those lines that your webpage content is matching the intent of that search. So that means that you need to do a little bit of legwork on your own, just Google and type in your search term to any browser that’s your favorite browser and look at what features actually appear in that search. So is it a local map? If so, you probably need to claim your Google My Business profile, your Yelp, and your Bing Places profiles. Is it a list? Is it a recipe? What is appearing in the search result page and how can you replicate that on your website, on your webpage, that you’re optimizing for that search to be able to come up better there?
Providing the best UX possible
Another thing that’s kind of along those same lines, but it’s really kind of an extrapolation from making sure that your intent on your page matches what your user is searching for, is making sure that you are providing a good user experience for your users.
Site load speed
So this has recently become more of a focus of especially Google, but search engines and platforms across the board where they really want to make sure that you have a good site load speed, that your website is not taking 20 seconds to load. Because people are busy. They’re not going to wait around for your website to load. And also a lot of people have limited data plans. And so if your website’s taking a long time to load, it’s probably also taking a lot of their data. But in general, it’s mostly down to the impatience issue.
Compliance
You also want to make sure that from a user experience perspective you are compliant. That you’re compliant with any of your local or international privacy guidelines. That you’re compliant with your ADA guidelines or the equivalent if you are not in the United States. And so those things require that you are using alt tags and that you are using the proper contrast. And also that you are using headings in the proper way to indicate the information hierarchy on your page. So we’ve actually prepared a keyword placement planner. If you’d like to download that, that will help you with some of those on-page ADA compliance guidelines. It’s not a comprehensive ADA compliance SEO guide, but it will get you started in the right direction. It’s mostly meant to help you put your keywords in the right places so that your website can come up in search.
Core web vitals
So the other thing that you want to think about with your user experience are your core web vitals. This was a recent update, and we have more information in our blog about the ins and outs of core web vitals. But the thing that you want to make sure is that you don’t have things jumping around on the page when someone’s trying to tap on their mobile device or click on something on their desktop device. You want to make sure that your site load speed again is fast, and that there’s not a lot of shifting of elements that aren’t user-initiated. It’s a very technical issue. And so if you don’t feel that you’re a technical person that could implement any core web vital optimization, you can go ahead and reach out to us and we can point you in the right direction. We have a couple of different options to help you with that.
Building Great Backlinks
But getting back to the crux here of which SEO techniques are popular, in addition to providing the best user experience possible and providing relevant copy on your website that is good for both humans and search engines, once you have those things implemented, then you want to start creating very high-quality backlinks with other people who share your same audience. So those can be your strategic partners. Those can be other influencers in your industry who might run a podcast or a YouTube show or have a thriving Facebook group. You want to start to connect with those people, see if there’s a piece of content that you can contribute to on their site, see if they would like to contribute within your site. And basically, while those things will help with your SEO and with your rankings and your authority, they’re also going to help you establish that trust with your target audience through that shared audience of other people who have already established trust.
So those are, I would say, the top three items right now that are popular in the SEO world and that can get you some very lucrative results. Always remember that SEO is like building your credit score. So you don’t come right out of the gate with an 800. You need to build it up over time. So it is something that you should plan on investing in the long term.
And if you have any questions, please reach out to me on Twitter, my handle is @IlluminousGwen, or reach me at any of the profiles below. In addition, we also have a monthly newsletter. If you’d like to sign up for that, you can click on the link below. Thank you so much and I hope this was helpful for you.
