Your digital marketing strategy is made up of many different tasks and disciplines; arguably the most important is ensuring that you are visible in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for your target keywords and phrases.

Google is still the most popular search vehicle and as it becomes more sophisticated in terms of delivering hyper-personalized results to searchers, it has never been more important for your business to rank well amongst your competitors both in general and local search and on a variety of devices, especially mobile.

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In this article, we take a look at some of the key ways you can hone your results by employing an effective search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

Understanding Google

Google’s search algorithm gets more sophisticated by the day and with each advance, there are myriad factors that need accounting for when it comes to an effective SEO strategy. Of all those factors (and there are thought to be over 200), there are a few that stand out as essential and correlate most highly with higher search engine rankings.

Not all factors deliver the same bang for your buck, so make sure you read a lot and research often as the industry never sits still. Keep learning and you’ll quickly discover how to filter the useful tasks from the less effective jobs.

Use the Right Tools

WordPress is probably the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world and it powers a great many of the websites you visit. One of the reasons for its popularity (alongside ease of use and security) is SEO friendliness.

Out of the box, WordPress is all set up to help you set your own meta-data, write your own description tags, and to ensure that all of your on-page content is optimized for target terms from your H2s to your ALT tags. There are also plenty of useful plugins to help you with your SEO with Yoast’s various tools being one of the most popular.

Related Guide: Advanced Technical SEO—A Complete Guide | SEJ

If you are using WordPress along with a variety of plugins and an ever-growing archive of content, you will be making changes to your website on a regular basis. WordPress is a database-driven CMS and it’s important that you are constantly backing up your work so you don’t lose any precious content or data. It’s advisable to have a secure data recovery strategy in place to mitigate any data loss disasters too.

Keyword Research Is Critical

It’s easy to get fixated on the keywords and phrases that we think we want to rank for. If we look at the terms we see our competitors ranking well for, it’s not difficult to get caught up in an ego-driven competition to outrank them. FOMO (fear of missing out) on this perceived wealth of traffic can be pretty compulsive.

In reality, we often find that the terms we think we should be found for can be quite different to the terms our potential customers are actually using when they are searching for our products or services.

Your keyword research should focus more on what they are actually typing into Google and less on what you think they should be typing into Google. A useful tip is to try using Google AdWords to test many of your keyword phrases. If you start to see positive results (high numbers of impressions) surrounding certain terms, you know these are popular search strings and probably worth optimizing your website to rank naturally for.

Wrapping Up

Doing your homework, collating the right tools and resources along with some strategic thinking on your target terms can help to give you some positive outcomes in your SEO endeavors.