Organic SEO or search engine optimization is one of the most important online marketing strategies in 2017. In fact, given that inbound marketing has replaced outbound marketing and that the buyer journey almost always includes research on search engines, SEO helps you to ensure that your brand will collide with your prospects at least once during their buying stage. In this post, you will learn the BEST organic SEO tips that work currently, RIGHT NOW!
Of course, ranking high in search engines in very tough. That is why it is important for you to grasp this concept if you want to reap the benefits of digital marketing. If you are a complete newbie with SEO, please do not skip the following section. If you are well aware of what optimization for search engines can do for your businesses and you want to dive straight to the organic SEO tips, you have my freedom to move to the second section.
What is Organic SEO?
SEO, organic SEO or search engine optimization, is the marketing process of optimizing your site, blog or website pages for search engines, with the sole purpose of climbing the SERPs (search engine results pages) ladder and appear on the first pages on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines for your specific keyword phrases.
For example, if you are selling iPhone luxury cases, good SEO can help you appear on the first page in Google for people searching for “luxury iPhone cases” or “expensive iPhone cases”. It’s a no brainer that SEO is a goldmine. Whatever the niche or industry you’re in, you can ensure a good slice of the organic traffic (which is free) and you can outsmart your competitors in vital areas, such as the awareness stage and consideration stages.
To make it even simpler to understand, just put yourself in your customers’ shoes. For the sake of it, we’ll stick with the previous example. You just bought yourself and you want a top iPhone case that showcases your personality. The first place where you’ll start your research is on Google or Bing. You’ll type in key phrases like “buy luxury iPhone cases”, “best iPhone cases 2017”, “top rated expensive iPhone cases”, and the list goes on. You will probably read a few blog posts and enter two or three sites that appear on the first page.
If your company name does not appear in the publications or websites present on the first page, your customers will more than likely pass you by. Thus, implementing SEO into your marketing strategy is crucial for your success online. Remember, getting found is the first step. If you are not there interacting with your prospects, most of them won’t even know that you exist.
Easy-to-Digest Organic SEO Tips for 2017 
Why easy-to-digest? There are certain advanced SEO tips, such as adding rich snippets, schema markup or linking to influencers, that are more suitable for an advanced SEO guide. We want to stick to the basics.
What’s amazing about SEO is that if you follow certain search engine optimization strategies and techniques, your success is almost guaranteed. On the same note, increasing organic traffic to your pages takes time, so expect a minimum of 6 months before noticing a spike in traffic.
Without further ado, here is what you can do from a SEO perspective in 2017:
1. Create Content that Rocks
According to most SEO specialists, including Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin, content is the strongest SEO signal in 2017, accounting for over 35% of a page ranking. First of all, ensure that you create high-quality content that is usable for the user. Try to have at least two landing pages, one for the awareness buyer stage and another one for the consideration stage. Create tailored content for each page that provides value to your prospects and solves their needs.
Remember, your content should be 100% unique. Check it with copyscape.com to ensure that it complies with Google’s terms. In case you need two or more versions of the same piece of content, make sure you use the rel=canonical tag. Also use the hreflang tag for regional urls.
One last point – make sure to include as many lsi keywords (latent semantic index keywords) as possible in the text and add the main keyword in the title, h1, h2, first and last paragraph. Remember, creating content that resonates with your customers’ pain points is a sure way to draw their interest and to establish yourself as an authority in their eyes.
Consider leveraging AI writing tools to streamline your content creation process. These tools can assist in generating creative and engaging content, ensuring that your writing not only resonates with your audience but also aligns with SEO best practices. Incorporating AI into your writing workflow can provide valuable insights and suggestions, making the content creation journey more efficient and effective.
2. Clean the Page
If you like anatomy, you will surely enjoy the anatomy of a perfectly search engine optimized landing page. Here are some points that you need to touch:
– Add meta tags that include the main keywords
– Leverage SEO-friendly URLs
– Add h1, h2, h3, etc
– Add external links to high-authority related sites
– Boost your site speed using Google’s tips listed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/. Another great tool is this: https://gtmetrix.com/.
– Go with https:// instead of http://
– Try AMP (https://www.ampproject.org/ ) – I guarantee your ranking will literally skyrocket using AMP
– Add alt tags to the images
– Use social sharing buttons
– Add breadcrumbs (or at least make links open in a new tab)
– Take advantage of rich snippets (schema.org)
Consider implementing strategic redirects to improve the overall cleanliness and usability of your page. Redirects can help maintain SEO value when you make changes to URLs or restructure your content. Use 301 redirects for permanent changes and 302 redirects for temporary ones. Building a robust redirect strategy ensures that users and search engines seamlessly navigate your site, preserving valuable rankings and user experience.
Having a properly optimized landing page that loads fast and is responsive on mobile accounts for another 30% of your search page ranking in search engines.
3. Get a Strong Social Presence
The social media has literally exploded in the last couple of years. The social signals are becoming increasingly important from an SEO perspective. In addition to driving a lot of social owned traffic to your landing page, platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit and above all else, Google+, are becoming increasingly important for your SEO ranking.
Let’s put it this way – the more people will share your page content on social networks, the more important your site will become in the eyes of search engines. Period.
4. External Link Building
Do not be deceived – link building is still one of the 3 top most important SEO ranking criteria, together with content and landing page optimization. However, link building has radically changed since the Penguin update. My advice – never buy links and do not bother to manually submit your site in directories. All you need are authority links relevant to your niche.
If you have money to spend, it is worth paying around $1,000 on a high-quality link on sites like forbes, inc or techtarget. If you don’t want to spend money on this, it is time to start building your own list of connections and enter the amazing world of link exchange. However, ensure that the whole process is transparent and falls within the white-hat SEO boundaries.
Conclusion
These are 4 of the most important organic SEO tips for you to follow in 2017. As an experienced SEO marketer, I can personally guarantee that your traffic will increase dramatically if you follow these tips to the T.
If you enjoyed this article, make sure to share it so that other business owners and marketers can benefit of these search engine optimization strategies.
