All business owners, whether they’re bloggers or CEOs, know that SEO is increasingly becoming an important part of any marketing strategy. Once you’ve understood the basics of SEO (aka what it is and how to get started) it can be hard to know how to take your SEO to the next level.

Don’t Concentrate Only On Rankings

Now, THIS ONE might seem counterintuitive but stick with it. Lots of bloggers and business owners think that the only use of SEO is to get to the top of the first page of Google. Rankings can, of course, boost your blog, but it isn’t the way to instant, overnight success. SEO is only a small part of what drives people to your website. Ranking highly on Google is a great help, but if your site doesn’t capture the people who see your listing and they don’t keep looking around when they reach the site, then the high ranking won’t help you.

If you already have the high ranking, you need to hold onto it. Track your rankings closely and measure your SEO results. You need to know what worked, so you can repeat it. Make sure your website is ready to hold onto visitors. If you can afford to, consider using an SEO agency to help you get and keep that high search ranking.

Optimise for Humans, Not Only Google

We all know that we should optimise our content for search keywords. But if the content isn’t interesting or helpful when a human being reaches the page then it’s not going to help you. If somebody clicks on your link, they should reach content that is relevant to them, or they will click straight off again. This is terrible for your bounce rate, which can negatively impact SEO.

Think about who visits your site and why, and create content for them. A great place to get inspiration is a question site like Quora. Look at the top questions in your subject area to see what answers people are looking for. For example, if you blog about parenting, you might look at parenting questions and find people asking things like:

• How to get a toddler to sleep
• How to help a teething baby
• Free activities to do with children when it’s raining

You can use these questions to get ideas for more content that you know people are actually interested in. Google likes content that answers questions.

A search bar is also a great website addition. This makes navigating easier for visitors, and you can use their search data for more ideas. Use the data to see what people are searching for while on your site. If they’re not getting results, then you know there’s a gap in your content that you can fill. Do some keyword research and create content that works for search engines and human site visitors.

Create Content For Backlinks

Backlinks can help your blog to look like an authority to search engines. Alongside your targeted content, create content on broader subjects, that won’t date, and that will be very linkable. For example, you could write a blog post about using Instagram, but keep it not specific to a particular industry. You can then link to that post from lots of other content on your site, and hopefully, other people will link to your guide too.

If you have any questions or feel that I have missed something vital, please do leave a comment below!

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