Scaling is wonderful because it means you are really starting to see the fruits of your SEO labor. You’ve more than likely found particular SEO tactics that work better than others, but you should have a comprehensive plan for scaling your efforts.
Before you spend a lot of time and money, it is vital to create a clear plan that lays out the SEO strategies that you will implement. The time when things in your business are going well is the perfect time to scale your SEO because of the resources you have available to obtain more leads and customers for your business.
How to scale up your SEO efforts
Let’s discuss some of the most essential things you can do when scaling up your SEO efforts. Here are 5 elements to focus on and why they matter.
1. Use evergreen SEO tactics
When scaling your SEO, the best thing you can do for yourself and your business is to use evergreen SEO tactics. These evergreen tactics are the actions you take with your website optimization that will always remain a priority, no matter what changes in the world of SEO. When a trending SEO strategy becomes useless, it is the evergreen tactics that will allow you to stay afloat.
Some evergreen SEO tactics include:
- Great Site Architecture with keyword targeting dialed into your pages
- Writing content that’s valuable for many years to come, if not forever.
- Keeping all your content relevant to your business and ideal customer
- Tracking changes in SEO to quickly adapt to new practices, for example, the updates Google has made around AI and Machine Learning
2. Focus your optimization efforts on your clients
Keeping a focus on your clients and the people who visit your site will always be a winning strategy. One of the more recent signals in SEO is keeping your visitors on your site for a longer period of time and browsing more content. This shows search engines your content is relatable and matches the intent of people visiting your site while also providing them real value.
When you continue to focus your optimization efforts on your clients, you will be rewarded with happy visitors that bring new people to your website through sharing of that content. Here are some ways to focus on your clients:
- Make sure the content your creating matches intent people are seeking.
- Ensure your website is easy to navigate so visitors can browse more content, find more related products, etc.
- Provide lots of additional resources and pages your users are interested in.
- Use internal linking to keep clients on your site longer, which in turn will allow search engines to crawl and index content faster, more frequently, and deeper.
3. Don’t forget about keyword research
Every business is unique and has different goals and visions for what growth looks like to them. Some businesses are focused on generating leads, others are focused on having people browse as much content as possible, where e-commerce is all about generating sales and revenue. When you think about your customer or visitor and what their end goal is, you can leverage seo keyword research to match intent.
“Winning keywords” will be different for each business, depending on their goals. Here are some ways to verify winning keywords for your unique scenario:
- Expand on your highest-searched content: Your analytics platform should tell you what people are searching for when they find pages on your site. Find the content that people searched a keyword and got to your page and add more relevant content to that page. Because search engines already find this page relevant and useful, adding additional keywords and content to your pages can add more keywords matching the intent of what people are looking for.
- Add related content based on your highest-searched content: Besides adding more keywords and content to an already-popular page, you can add new pages that are related to your highest-searched content. Find your most popular page and write more pages that relate to that central topic. Then, use internal links in your popular page to link to your new pages. This will both organically pass along visitors to more relevant content and will help search engines find your new content more easily.
- Find and use keywords that help a user take action: Find keywords that help a user take the action you want them to take. Think about the keywords you use when searching for information about a general topic compared to the keywords you use when searching for something to buy. If you want more customers, add more buying-related keywords.
For instance, let’s say you are selling a service that helps small businesses create promotional flyers. Writing content with the keyword phrase “different types of flyers for small businesses” won’t get a lot of visitors looking to purchase your service. However, using the keyword phrase “how to create a flyer for your small business that gets more customers” will be targeting people who are trying to solve a problem in which your service is the solution.
4. Maintain a solid site architecture that keeps people on your site
Site architecture is crucial when scaling your SEO efforts for many reasons. Primarily, this means search engines will be able to crawl and index that content more efficiently, as mentioned above. In my opinion the technical seo factors around crawling and indexing are vastly underrated in their performance effects.
Building your site architecture with the user in mind helps to keep people on your site for more extended periods. Search engines can see how long users spend on your website after finding your content through their search engine, and this tracking helps search engines find out how popular your content is.
Here are four things to think about when building a solid site architecture:
- Have a primary navigation that allows users to easily find other areas of your site.
- Include contextual in-content links that bring users to relevant pages.
- Include “related pages” at the end of each page in case users are looking for more.
- Include breadcrumb navigation that allows users to go back to where they just were.
5. Keep up SEO efforts that have been working
Don’t discount what has already been working. While it is nice to expand your SEO efforts to new strategies and tactics, keep a large part of your focus on what has already been working. For many years on end, I’ve been focused on a lot of the efforts mentioned previously and our team and I are completely in sync about this.
Both users and search engines will have already told you what has been working on your site based on their actions and what they say. You don’t need to change your entire SEO strategy based on what worked for someone else. Every website or business will require a different approach based on their individual scenario.
If high-quality backlinking has been working, keep it up. If focusing on social sharing has been working, keep it up. Continuing your current SEO efforts will help your consistency, even when you begin to expand and scale your SEO.
Create your SEO scaling plan
Before you jump into your new SEO scaling strategy, create a plan. Make sure you understand the time, money, and effort that you will need to put into your plan. Not everything will work right away and in many cases, there are many factors that will go into your site not ranking for a very long time. I’ve seen cases at larger organizations that I’ve worked at (e.g. Yahoo!) where our efforts didn’t work for up to 16 months.
It happens and you have to remember, SEO is not a sure thing. But, if you’re seeing things moving directionally well, keep at it. And, remember that it’s not only about rankings of one or a handful of terms, it’s about the overall growth of traffic, revenue, and don’t underestimate the power of long-tail traffic growth.
The 5 tips discussed above are good places to start and helpful things to think about before you start any new SEO strategy. Remember, each website is unique and will require different approaches to reach success.
If you need additional help creating an SEO Program for your business, take a look at our SEO approach and the key to our SEO success here. We keep it simple, but it has worked time and time again.
