7 April 2020

Five Key Applied SEO Techniques

Last week, the SEO expert team at Bury’s only full service digital agency showed you how to find great keywords. That knowledge will really help your search engine optimization efforts and your ranking improve, but we’re not done just yet. We told you we’re passionate about SEO, and this week the Seek Social SEO expert team are back for more! Possessing a list of awesome keywords and using them to great effect is one thing… However, it’s not everything. That’s why today, we’re going to talk you through some applied techniques that help us get search engine optimization right, for ourselves and our clients!

1) There’s more than one way to say things…

There are literally hundreds of terms that could be used to search for the same piece of information. If you’re having trouble finding a good keyword it’s important to remember this. Why? Because sometimes the secret lies in changing your approach. Rather than adding yet another modifier to an already long search term that isn’t delivering results – try rephrasing or restructuring. Don’t change what you say, just look for another way to put it. And how do you find these different approaches? Well, in the experience of our SEO expert team, these next two points really help…

2) Think like you search…

The SEO staff at Bury’s top full service digital agency know that people have a peculiar way of ‘speaking’ when using a search engine. On the phone you might say ‘I’m in Manchester and I’m looking for a curry house’. However, you’re more likely to Google ‘curry house Manchester’. This piece of vital knowledge is something search engine optimization novices can sometimes forget. However keeping it in mind can help you hone in on the most important parts of your SEO keyphrase. In turn, that can allow you to more easily build long tail variants and other alternatives around that core concept.

3) Walk a mile in your audience’s shoes…

When writing for SEO, it’s a good idea to ask yourself “If I wanted to find something like this online, what would I search for?” This gets the search engine optimization ball rolling, as your answers will be a great place to begin your SEO keyword research. Don’t forget that you can also add modifiers to this question that can help you target certain demographics. For example: “If I was a novice and wanted to learn about [your specialist topic] what would I put into Google?” Lastly, the SEO expert team UK at the North West’s premier full service digital agency – Seek Social – know that the best time to ask this question is after you’ve finalised the idea for your content, but before you actually start writing. That way you can identify some great keywords, plan your prose around them, and bake them into your content from the very start.

4) Don’t believe the ‘zero traffic’ myth…

Seek Social have talked before about how search volume is a key metric for prospective SEO keywords. We’ve said that using terms that are too popular are a bad thing for SEO. However we’ve also said that terms that generate no traffic are a bad idea too. What our SEO expert team would recommend you bear in mind though is this key fact… The ‘searches per month’ figures you see on things like Moz or Ahrefs are only estimates. So, just because keywords return a value of zero does not necessarily mean that nobody Googled them last month.

Indeed, sites using such keywords could still be getting hundreds of visitors per month. The leading full service digital agency in Bury still advocates targeting keywords in the 10 – 10,000 searches per month range as best practice. However, if a keyword returns zero searches per month on these tools, but it’s a really good fit for your content… It’s probably still worth going after.

5) Your chosen keyword might not be your only keyword…

Bury’s best full service digital agency and our SEO expert team would also like to remind you of this: If you can rank for a keyword, naturally you should also rank well for all longer tail variants of that keyword. Why? Because said original keyword is also part of the longer-tail variant. For example, if you rank for the SEO term ‘acid jazz music’, you should also rank well for ‘acid jazz music 2020’, ‘youtube acid jazz music’ ‘best acid jazz music’, ‘acid jazz music Manchester’ and so on…

This works in reverse too. Each time you use a keyword like ‘acid jazz music Manchester’, you are also using two shorter SEO keywords… These being ‘acid jazz music’ and ‘jazz music Manchester’. If you can use such a search engine optimization keyword enough times, you stand a good chance of having your page rank well for three terms rather than one. As an added bonus, this strategy might also let you tap into additional sources of traffic. In this particular case the additional sources would be people looking for acid jazz music (but not in Manchester), and people looking for jazz music in Manchester in general – i.e. not specifically ‘acid jazz’.

The final word…

So there you have it folks… Four great practical SEO techniques that can really help you improve your search engine optimization scores. If you do reach a point where it starts to be getting too much though – that’s when it’s time to call the SEO expert team at Seek Social. Our dedicated team are here to help your website climb the rankings, and we have a number of proven processes and methods to make that happen. Find out more by calling us today, on 0161 761 1800, and of course don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter too!