Your SEO is instrumental to the success of your blog or online store. But the trick to effective SEO is to optimize it for long-term success. This is where the concept of sustainable SEO comes in. In this blog post, we discuss what sustainable SEO is and how you can make your SEO become sustainable.
What is sustainable SEO?
SEO helps rank your website in the search engine. The quality of SEO you use will determine which rank you end up in online. This rank changes as the quality and effectiveness of your SEO varies, compared to other websites. So, you’ll need to have a consistently effective SEO strategy that withstands the test of time. But not every brand can afford to hire full-time SEO specialists to work on their SEO every working minute of every day. This is where it helps to have an SEO strategy that supports itself in the long run, i.e., an SEO strategy that is sustainable.
Sustainable SEO is an SEO element that helps you consistently work your way up search engine ranking, but which doesn’t need too much intervention from you. It’s an SEO strategy that is planned smartly and executed well from the start, ensuring you don’t need to make too many changes to your SEO implementation.
How can you make your SEO more sustainable?
Some of the ways to make your SEO sustainable are –
- Review competitor SEO practices to see what works and how it works
The first thing to do when implementing sustainable SEO practices is to study your biggest competitors to know what SEO strategy works and what doesn’t. Secondly, you need to understand the mechanics of how successful SEO strategies work and why they’re so successful for your competitors. This will give you a framework about where you need to start and how you can implement your own SEO strategy. Additionally, a competitor study will also let you know of overused keywords and rehashed SEO trends that are stale today and which may not give your brand the best result.
Tools like SpyFu, Page Optimizer Pro, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are some of the tools you can use for competitive SEO analysis.
- Set a baseline for the performance you want to achieve
Once you understand the technicalities of your competitor’s SEO campaigns, create a baseline for your own performance. Here, you need to determine what success looks like for you. For example, your goal may be to reduce your page load time from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds. Or, your performance baseline could be to always consistently maintain a conversion rate of 2% every month.
These baseline performances will help you plan your SEO strategies in such a way that you always meet your baseline performance. You can raise the goalpost in the future, based on how you meet current goals.
- Create content that adds value to different types of readers
One of the main elements of quality and sustainable SEO is content. When you have interesting and informative content for people to read, your blog or website will continue to attract a steady stream of site visitors. The increased traffic to your website will ensure your site has a high ranking and is findable in new searches.
When creating content, your goal should be to make it always relevant. So, come back to the post or page frequently and make minor updates, by adding new-age research, replacing obsolete wording, and sprucing up the content for the new reader.
- Keep updating your keywords in the post, over time, with the help of Google AdWords
Keyword relevance is again a very important aspect of SEO sustainability. It doesn’t help to retain keywords that were powerful 5 years ago, especially now when those keywords may be obsolete. Being on top of your keyword game should always be the goal. You need to do regular research to find out which keywords or key phrases have the highest bids and which are trending now. Google AdWords produces rich reports that you can use for this keyword performance analysis. Just as with the content, you’ll need to return frequently to update your keywords. This will help the search engine find your website even as the years go by.
- Link to relevant internal pages for easy navigation
The quality of internal links is also very important when it comes to SEO sustainability. At the end of the day, people visit your site with a particular purpose in mind. Your job is to help them achieve this purpose – be it by directing them to the FAQs page or helping them navigate to the product portfolio page or any other objective they have.
Be sure to link relevant internal pages to your current page, to support easy navigation. Have a visible site map that helps readers quickly go to the pages they’re actually interested in. Have buttons visible and accessible to users in priority areas of the page.
When people find your site easy to use and helpful to their goals, they’ll come back to it often, thereby increasing your ranking online.
- Use AI to help you with your SEO
Finally, enlist the help of artificial intelligence to improve your SEO quality. AI tools leverage the power of natural language processing, enabling you to understand exactly how people search for content that you publish. You can use AI to decide which keywords to use, what topics to write content about, what website design to implement on your site, and more. Since AI takes data from millions of users in real-time to recommend SEO tips for you, you’ll be in a better place to make smart SEO decisions that can give you sustained growth.
Tracy is the Design Manager here at Redwood Creative. She’s been designing amazing graphics and web layouts for large and small businesses for upwards of 7 years.
