7 Crucial Factors For a Holistic SEO Practice That Never Go Out of Trend

Search engine optimization is a broad term. However, when it comes to the crucial factor of website traffic, search tops the chart. Other traffic drivers stay behind it. With Google churning out about 3.5 million searches every day, it’s clear to see why search is still prevalent.

Therefore, entrepreneurs and business owners should focus on appearing in search result pages to get more traffic. If people can find you in search results, it’s most likely that you would attract potential buyers, drive traffic, and boost revenue.

This is where the end game begins too! Business owners find it hard to stay on the top in Google search. They start using vast marketing tactics, SEO strategies, and other hacks in the wake of the top position. They hop on these ideas either in-house or hire a highly-priced service.

We understand that search is getting better day by day. While text search is still relevant, image search and voice search also have made their presence felt. Sticking to the old-school SEO tactics isn’t going to work longer.

The sole purpose of search engines is to provide users with significant results to cater to their needs. For example, people looking for the Avengers: Endgame tickets would look forward to finding results of the same. Of course, they would be disappointed to get the results of Avengers: Infinity War instead!

So to help you stay on the top, here we bring you 7 crucial factors for holistic SEO practice.

1. Website design

Among several critical factors, web page design is crucial. It also includes several other factors that digital marketers looking to run a holistic SEO campaign(s) should consider. The old concept “build a website and customers would come” has been retired. It’s an era where audience judges a site in just mere seconds.

So to make your website design and development effective, start with the header and the first half of your page. Find out how effective it works and whether it’s creating any first impression. Proper navigation along with link labels also has an important role to play. They entice visitors for further action.

Other website design factors include site speed, loading time, and mobile compatibility. With all, you also need to focus on remarkable user experience as a part of your holistic SEO campaign. Any snag in these factors will cost you losing visitors; so be careful.

You can take the example of HubSpot. Its website design is clean and has clear H1 tag — “Hubspot Salesforce Integration.”

It also has a concise description below every image. As far as H2 tag is concerned, it’s been used tactically. All in all, the site design is optimized.

2. Dedicated landing Pages for Engagement

Engagement is yet another factor that decides the success or failure of your SEO campaign. If the engagement is excellent, visitors would be happy. But to do that, they should be provided with the most relevant or useful information, content, product or service they look for.

How do you do that? The answer is simple— by creating dedicated landing pages. A well-created web page design is proportional to driving more traffic, improving lead generation, and boosting sales. The more the landing pages, the better the search traffic. If you increase the number of landing pages, it means you open up new avenues for traffic.

However, companies fail to capitalize on landing pages especially in the B2B sphere. About 44% of their traffic is routed to a home page rather than a landing page.

Customers redirected to a landing page find it easy to engage with the product or service they look for. As a result of better engagement, they show interest, convert and finally buy.

The Google Cloud Platform is one of the best examples of dedicated landing pages. It has a clear headline that offers free resources. The CTA has been placed in a shade that pops out instantly. It asks the users for conversion and also includes a list of benefits after they convert they would get.

3. On-page Activities

When it comes to semantic search, on-page SEO is still relevant. But these activities should be done in a holistic manner. There is no doubt that technical aspects are important, other aspects like sitemap, title tag, coding, navigation, meta description, and usability still matter. There are also some new on-page activities that you need to take care of.

Taking care of these things will make your approach more focused on search intent; the relevant content audience will look for, expect or prefer to see. Remember, it’s a constant process that you need to process regularly as a part of your holistic SEO campaign.

For example, when you add Meta Title and Description on your page, it becomes visible in the Google search. Use your targeted keywords in the Meta Description and Title for easy search.

4. Link Building

What if you have pages that rank on the second or third pages of Google search results? What if your website doesn’t have any outbound links? In both cases, you need to create link juice. It means creating high-quality backlinks.

Search users looking for particular content, service or item click links that they think would redirect them to the term they searched for. Whether you know or not, but seventy percent of such links come from organic search. In Google, websites ranking on the top position create 18% of organic clicks, while those on the second position account 10% and the ones at third position generate 7% of organic clicks. There are several factors contributing to organic search results, link building is one of them.

But when you create a link, you should follow a holistic approach. Create outbound links from high-authority sites. This will increase the quality of your links and Google will think that your content is of high-quality too. This will improve your ranking significantly.

Stay away from spam and bad backlinks.

Wikipedia is a great example of a website that has many links and references. With every topic it covers, the website provides a number of outbound links that take you to credible resources. The same goes for Neil Patel’s website. He never forgets linking his blog with external resources while citing them.

5. Add Social Credentials

With over 2.77 billion users worldwide, social media has penetrated people’s lives massively. So, it becomes natural that social media would become a significant channel in influencing the search results. Besides, it is also a relevant traffic booster. It also helps in increasing your brand’s credibility, authority, and relevance.

The role of social media increases manifolds if you generate quality content that has the ability to go viral. If it’s so, it would generate massive social signals including likes, shares, comments and more. These all are important factors that influence ranking in web search results. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are some of the famous networking sites you can take advantage of.

Take for an example The Verge’s this particular article that includes social media buttons in one of its articles. It shows how many times the article was liked on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other channels.

6. Optimize your Content for Search Queries (Semantic SEO)

Do you remember the time when Google introduced Hummingbird search algorithm?

Before rolling out this search algorithm, the search engine giant focused only on the individual keywords on a page. But Hummingbird allowed it to analyze what the topic is all about. The ability of understanding search queries and ranking search pages accordingly is known as — Semantic Search.

But the most important question is— how would you optimize your content for search queries or semantic SEO?

Here is the answer. First of all, optimize your web page with your target keywords— a practice that you usually do. Now, include subtopics relevant to your target keyword(s). This way Google will understand your page’s topic along with the keyword.

Here is an example to understand it better. Someone searches for “Who is Neil Patel” in Google, and the search engine shows the relevant results. Look closely and you will find Neil Patel is the main keywords and the result starts with the same.

However, the search query is done through Google Assistant. The same can be applied for the text query.

7. Use the Same AdWords Copy for On-page SEO

To stay ahead of the competition, search keywords ideas in your competitor’s AdWords ads. We all know these ads are optimized and short in nature. Also, they include the targeted keywords. If you can create a quality content that ranks well in organic search for the same keywords, you can catch the attention of your audience.

Remember, consumers don’t want any ads to chase them every time and for that, they don’t mind downloading AdBlocker Plus and other ad blocking tools.

Ranking higher in organic searches creates trust and you will be visible to those who use ad blockers.

Here is a brilliant example of the same. Plan.io uses the same copy to sell its products’ features. It includes a technical as well as the specialized item so its ad copy is written for an audience who want the exact features.

Conclusion

Each and every step discussed earlier has one goal— to help you rank higher in Google search. Follow them and don’t forget to look for some more options out there.