SEO is not always intuitive. As you immerse yourself in the basics of digital marketing, you’re more likely to have more and more questions. Of course, you probably already know a set of standard SEO strategies. But you’ve likely encountered a barrier to further growth.
It’s time to start thinking outside the box. Of course, SEO basics are fundamental, but to achieve truly outstanding results, you need something else. Here are 10 unconventional SEO strategies, different from your usual practices, that will help you get better results.
You probably understand how a landing page works, but let’s dive deeper into the subject. A landing page is a page to which users click on a link that leads to your site.
Regarding SEO strategies, this is likely to be a user who found your site in search engine results for a particular query.
Here you can put all the essential information about your product or service, functionality for making a purchase, or collecting contact information. So, in many ways, a landing page is an essential part of your SEO strategies.
It all affects the bounce rate and the time users spend on the page. These two parameters play a critical role among the hundreds of ranking signals Google uses to analyze sites. Obviously, the site’s ranking drops if the bounce rate is too high, the site’s ranking drops. The situation is similar to session duration: the lower it is, the lower the site’s ranking.
When choosing from SEO strategies, it is necessary to study the information about the landing page in detail. The ultimate goal of all SEO strategies is to improve the user experience. The easier the service is to use, the better. It follows that your landing page should not contain anything superfluous. Make sure that your landing page is consistent with what you are promoting. For example, the meta title and description should match the actual content on the page.
If you’ve updated your content, match the new information to the meta tags. Avoid overusing keyword phrases. It’s better to write valuable textual content. The best call to action in metadata that really works is your most valuable asset. Ultimately, ensure that the text of the link to the new page is relevant to its content.
Conversion is the fulfillment of targeted actions by your users. You can set any parameters for your target conversions: from making a purchase to subscribing to a newsletter. When creating new pages, you must ensure those goals align with your SEO strategy.
Conversion goals and strategies range from organic traffic to users coming in through advertising. However, each of these marketing strategies can make a difference. Design your landing pages for specific goals. For example, if your landing page is designed for advertising purposes, the information it contains should be clear and understandable. When optimizing for organic traffic, make sure that the content matches the information displayed by search engines.
Compare results, as the landing page can work in tandem to promote products and optimize. Noticing that your SEO traffic is converting better than your advertising traffic, your landing page may not fit your advertising budget. If your landing page is designed for advertising and SEO, but optimization is not producing results, you need to review your SEO strategies.
The fact is that Google already knows all the statistics. If you have Google Analytics connected to your site, you can find out where leads are going. Meanwhile, Google has automated this process. So even if you get high volumes of inbound convertible ad traffic, that’s no guarantee of high rankings for your site.
Some experts overemphasize overall optimization, forgetting an essential part of it. Local SEO strategies are the best way to reach an audience of potential customers who may come to your physical outlets or use local online services. In fact, we’re talking about the practice of local optimization for relevant local queries. Your goal is to get to the top of the search results in your region or city.
Google My Business is an essential tool for your local search engine optimization. By prioritizing it correctly, you can get significant results. For example, every time a potential customer searches for a particular service or area you work in, your business will be first among those suggested by the search engine.
Combating spam is the most essential aspect of local SEO. To be the best, many companies fall back on honest promotion methods. One example is putting a keyword in your company’s name in Google My Business. If you notice this, be sure to report the violation to Google. That way, you can eliminate the dishonest competitor because you want to stand up to real competitors, not those not playing by the rules.
Google is known to be ruthless in its fight against spam. However, spam will always exist, so this local SEO strategy takes a lot of time and effort. In the end, the results won’t be long in coming.
You should make the navigation as easy as possible. Breadcrumbs are a great tool to ensure that both visitors and search engines don’t get “lost” in the pages of your site. They pave a clear path from your homepage to your landing page.
Wanting to get significant promotion results, you should use breadcrumbs on your site:
Surprisingly, many websites don’t pay enough attention to this simple strategy. Even if you own a small business with a website of only 20 pages, breadcrumbs make a huge difference.
Set realistic goals that can actually be achieved. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a set of indicators that are available to track and clearly demonstrate the results of the work done on website optimization. Among the massive set of KPIs, there are several key indicators that should be constantly monitored.
Let’s look at some of the most important key performance indicators:
If you have just started your SEO strategies and do not clearly understand where you are at the moment, it will be very difficult to track the results. Pay attention to the growth outside of keyword rankings. Keep track of your visitors’ organic traffic and behavioral traits, click-through rates, and bounce rates. You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor these indicators.
Although we’ve already talked about conversions, it’s essential to know if your search engine optimization affects your conversions. Of course, advertising is a significant source of conversions. However, it would help if you maximize the effectiveness of your promotional campaign to maximize conversions. Even if you use good SEO strategies, this is no guarantee that you will get good organic conversions.
The loading speed of individual pages can be different from the loading speed of the site as a whole. Page speed is the time it takes for all the content on a particular page to load. Search engines rate sites highly with minimal page load time (especially mobile versions). Track this metric with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Crawl depth is the number of pages the search robots have to crawl before they reach the landing page or any other landing page. Use breadcrumbs. But crawl depth is not a visual path but the actual pages a user or search robot must visit before they end up in a particular location on your site. And that depth should be no more than four pages. A user must go to each new page; you lose traffic. For this reason, internal links play an essential role in marketing тв SEO strategies.
By SEO copywriting, we mean writing quality content that works for users and search bots.
Content aimed only at bots can be keyword-rich but empty in content. Users are not interested in this. They probably will not read it and will leave the site. This will affect the ranking: search engines do not keep the top sites from which users are fleeing.
But if you write materials thinking only about people, you risk choosing the wrong keywords for which real users search the topic. As a result, the page will not give the ranking and traffic results that it could.
You need to choose interesting topics for the reader, design the material so that it is easy to perceive, and get rid of water. Still, you should not forget about the semantics and proper markup collection.
Such content will be good for the site’s SEO and will bring pluses on ranking factors:
How to get a reader interested in three steps
This technique should keep users on the page and show why they should read your material. This will reduce bounce rates and increase session time on the page.
The trick is three steps. Brian Dean called it “APP”: Agree, Promise, and Preview.
Let’s break down the technique in more detail:
An idea or concept that the audience of this material agrees with. This is how you show that you understand their problem.
An example: Most people looking for information on optimization techniques have become frustrated with SEO advice from the Internet.
That’s why he emphasizes that in the article, only working methods are proven in practice. This is how he shows that he feels their pain.
What can happen if the reader uses the tips from the material? Continuing the example of SEO tips, you need to write about what the methods in the article are aimed at and what the author achieved through their use.
Announcement
What will the reader find in the material? This example could be a list of SEO techniques that the author discussed in the article, designed as clickable content for easy navigation.
With such a template, you can convince users that the material will be useful to them because it solves their problem and promises clear results. Provided your arguments are convincing to the audience the article is intended for.
When a user comes to a page from a search engine, he usually takes a quick look at it. If nothing interesting catches his eye, he may leave. Readers can be held back by accent elements – Bucket Brigades.
Bucket Brigades are short sentences ending with a colon, usually in a larger font than the main text.
“Bucket Brigades” means passing items down the chain, the way they used to put out fires by passing buckets of water to each other. In the context of SEO, these phrases also move the reader’s attention from one paragraph of the article to the next.
This copywriting tactic was originally developed for promotional emails, but for SEO strategies, it is also useful – it allows you to increase the user’s session time on the page.
Examples of phrases:
You can make up your own to fit the context of your material.
A study of 912 million articles found that users are likelier to share articles with long headlines. Perhaps this is since such titles of articles more fully disclose the topic, attracting details. And they may also include more keywords.
Write an introduction to the PBC formula.
While reading an article, a user is constantly deciding whether to continue reading the material. According to studies, the first scroll of content is the most read, so it’s best to write the most important and catchy information there.
In our experience as users, many authors are afraid to start with useful information “head-on” and try to lead off smoothly with a long lead with well-known facts or the term’s history. Since these are common knowledge facts, reading about them is not interesting.
All of us often skip such introductions or close articles where the author has gotten carried away with getting to the point.
Brian Dean developed a formula for writing the introduction to an article. He called it the “PBC Formula” based on the first letters of Preview, Benefits, and Call-to-action – content, benefits, and call-to-action.
1. List the benefits the reader will get from learning the material:
These techniques will help increase traffic to the blog and keep readers’ attention. They’re all tried and true – here’s a case study in which a blog author was able to increase organics without investing several times over – screenshot.
2. Call to action:
Try implementing these techniques on your blog and measure the results
or simply, Let’s get started!
This kind of introduction introduces the reader right away, answers their question of “why should I read the material in the first place” and is usually worded briefly, so it doesn’t take a lot of time.
3. Check the page: optimization, relevance, and technical parameters.
You can quickly check a page online through Content Analysis. It assesses the relevance of the text to the keywords you specified, checks the filling of meta tags, and analyzes the structure of the text, as well as technical parameters: download speed, presence of micro markup, number of links, canonical URL, and more.
The tool works for free and checks any page of the site.
Get more reposts with Twitter.
It’s common to put social media buttons at the end of the material or at the bottom of the page for reposts. With reposts, the page gets links, a new traffic channel emerges, and more people can see it.
There are buttons like these on many sites. They’re familiar and not conspicuous. You can get even more reposts if you put call-to-action buttons inside the article where it is relevant.
For each such call to share on Twitter, it is better to make a different text: it must be related to the content of the item and intriguingly worded.
How to add a button for a tweet with a quote
There are services for this, for example, ClickToTweet. It allows you to create five free tweets, track stats, and shorten links.
For more, there are paid plans.
Put tweets in places in the article where something is interesting and unusual that the user might want to share.
Facebook’s algorithms give less priority to posts that take users away from their platform. So just sharing a link to an article on the site isn’t enough. You need to add native content.
A post with a short article description gives social media algorithms what they want – original content and engagement.
As a result, such posts bring in more traffic.
This is another one of the SEO strategies. In this case, the main KPI of the project is the amount of highly targeted search traffic. The task is to widely cover the semantics – this is usually from 2-3 to 40-50 thousand search queries.
You have to constantly work with this semantic core, mass and pattern the pages and evaluate the dynamics of the URL groups. Many professionals now follow these SEO strategies, often without realizing that they bet on the BF and BF. As a rule, the objectives and hypotheses they form as part of this strategy should be most effective if they address the entire host and are scalable.
In other words, it’s pretty useless to think about how you can improve positions on one mLF query if it can’t be scaled, or applied to neighboring hundreds, thousands of other search queries. So you must stop every time you think of some hypothesis to improve the position of any query. Instead, you have to ask yourself the reasonable question, “So what do we do about it next?”
The key KPI here is visibility for a narrow group of queries, but in this case, they are branded and associated with a particular manufacturer. Maximum coverage of all branded queries, and different spellings, as part of the high-, medium- and low-frequency keywords – you have to hit the user’s need as accurately as possible. Mono-brand stores often don’t do search engine promotion, thinking they’ll be found anyway. In fact, we know that mono-brand stores usually have no more than 50% visibility in the semantics they promote, although, in reality, they should have visibility close to 100%.
Clearly, this is often solved by matching the user’s exact need – in particular, by creating additional pages that will fall pretty clearly into what the user is looking for. For example, a query like “bags that are allowed in samsonite carry-on luggage” should lead to a page that matches the query. This is where the Customer Journey Map needs to be worked out, where we talk about and understand how users interact from the moment a need is formed to the specific transaction.
For example, many mono-brand stores operate through dealers, and we need to think through the user journey from visiting the official site to finding the specific store where they will make a purchase. In this SEO strategy, such hypotheses are formed: search cues, reviews, conversion, commercial ranking factor, and working through the semantic core with different brand spelling options.
By itself, generated SEO strategies do not automatically get results. If you have conducted analytical work and discussed all the steps but did not take concrete action, the site will not move. Even though this is obvious, people are waiting for growth after in-depth analytical work. You have to understand that analytics is the ground for management decisions. You have to decide in what direction the project will move.
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