10 powerful SEO techniques which are best for the long run.

Hi, there I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn everything related to which SEO techniques are best for the long run.

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Which SEO techniques are best for the long run.

Here is a list of 10 SEO techniques that are best in the long run.

1. Optimize for mobile use.
2. Content that matches search intent is the ultimate king.
3. Manage your existing content.
4. Optimize your blog post for voice search, featured snippets, and rank brain.
5. Focus on branding marketing and design.
6. Establish EAT.
7. Focus on technical SEO and local SEO.
8. Focus on topic research instead of Keyword research.
9. Build a diversified backlinks profile.
10. Blog on a single niche and analyze the growth.

Let’s learn all the techniques in detail here.

1. Optimize for mobile use.

When it comes to best SEO techniques For the long run,

The most important technique you must Consider no matter what is,

Optimizing your website for mobile.

Talking about mobile optimization of your website, Essentially we are emphasizing two major aspects.

• Mobile-friendliness.
• Mobile speed.

I don’t want to brag on how important mobile optimization is when it comes to the best SEO technique for the long run, 

Because the stats speak for themselves,

• 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones. 
• On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 27.7% of the clicks, whereas ranking in position #1 on the desktop gets you 19.3% of the clicks.
• There are more searches on mobile than on desktop. 
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• As page time goes from 1s-5s probability of bounce increases by 90%.

Now that you know the statistics about mobile speed and mobile usage.

It is no brainer that you should highly focus on the mobile experience of your website when we are talking about the best SEO techniques for the long run.

You should also know that Google has changed its default indexation process from desktop-first indexing to mobile-first indexing in 2019 itself.

2. Content that matches search intent is the ultimate king.

No matter what people think or say when it comes to best SEO techniques for the long run, 

There is no replacement for content, not even backlinks.

Website content firmly holds the place of the King no matter what.

But not all content is king.

Content that matches the search intent is the ultimate king.

Here is the deal,

In today and the future of SEO,

You cannot expect to rank your website or blog high on Google and Other search engines if you don’t match or meet what the searcher is looking for when he searches the keyword or topic in Google.

This is called search intent.

Irrespective of how great, Helpful and in-depth your content be, 

If you don’t match the search intent, don’t expect higher rankings.

• For more information on search intent, types, and examples, click here.

Well, knowing Content that matches search intent is the ultimate king in SEO,

What you can do is focus on creating highly informative, in-depth, actionable content on your website around that topic.

Make your content super helpful by Adding images, screenshots, infographics, and other media files with lots of data and stats to back your claims in your blog.

Because helpful content that matches search intent is the future of SEO.

3. Manage your existing content.

When we are talking about managing your existing content on your website, it is 3 Essential things in specific.

A] Update old posts.

Here is a quick stat,

• 34% of bloggers say that updating content produces strong results.

People like new content over old ones.

Because people prefer New fresh content Over an old piece of content in search results, Google ranks websites that are updated frequently.

Frequently updating older posts tells Google that,

• You are the expert on the topic.
• You have a more accurate piece of information.
• Add some freshness and life to your website and open up new opportunities for building backlinks.

After publishing the whole bunch of blog post on your website,

Using tools like Google search console.

Optimize your blog for keywords that your post already ranks high,

Match the search intent of the keyword with content and make it a more helpful resource by updating the article and its content with better resources and stats.

This way you can double down the traffic of your website by updating your existing blog posts rather than creating a whole bunch of new blog posts which is more time-consuming.

B] Rewrite, Consolidate or delete bad pages.

Look there are already a lot of blogs are published on the internet

There are over a billion blogs on the internet Which is a massive number.

And when you’re posting a blog on your website focus on Quality first and quantity second And that is what Google wants as well.

By putting more emphasis on the quality of the blog post, You can increase the chance of getting ranked on Google.

If you have already established a website With hundreds of blog posts published, 

It is a good practice to implement the strategy of deleting bad posts or consolidating multiple posts into a single post.

You can decide the quality of a post by following factors,

• Traffic that the blog post drives every month.
• Total Word count of the post.
• Total number of Backlinks that the post has acquired.
• Check when the blog post was published(date).
• Check the accuracy and Readability of the information present in the blog post.

By these five factors, you can decide whether you should Delete or consolidate or update or rewrite the blog post.

If you have multiple posts targeting the same keyword or topic on your website (keyword cannibalization).

It is highly recommended to consolidate all the multiple posts into a single large post and redirect all other posts to that post.

This way your posts will stop Competing against each other and drive more traffic and conversions to your website.

If you have a post that does not matter the search intent of the keyword or the topic consider writing the entire blog post again And reindex the blog post on the Google search console.

If you have a blog post that is underperforming in terms of traffic and has bad quality content that did not acquire backlinks as well, has low conversions and Low-quality content overall,

It is highly recommended to delete such blog posts So that You have only high-quality pages published on your website to rank on google.

This way you can see an increase in traffic to your website and increase conversion rates as well.

For more information on deleting the blog post Read the article of search engine journal here.

C] Repurpose your existing content.

You should also consider repurpose And republish your existing content of blog posts into other forms of content.

Focus mainly on platforms like:

• YouTube.
• Podcast.
• Pinterest.
• Medium.
• Tumblr, etc.

Consider YouTube mainly because of these stats,

• Meanwhile, 1 billion hours of YouTube videos are watched daily.
• Video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search traffic than plain text.
• 89% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI.
• 83% of video marketers say video helps them with lead generation.
• 82% of all consumer web traffic will be video.

Make YouTube videos of your blog post and publish them on YouTube.

For more information learn about it.

• Pinterest here.
• Tumblr here.
• Podcast here.

With that said let’s see the next best technique.

4. Optimize your blog post.

Talking about the optimization of your blog post, There are 3 important things you need to look after.

A] Optimize your blog post for voice search.

Take a look at the stats first,

• By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-activated.
• 20% of mobile queries are currently done with voice search.
• 72% of people who use voice search devices claim they have become part of their daily routines.

Voice Search is continuing to grow.

In such a case, Optimising your blog post for a voice is a key part of SEO In the long run.

Here are a few tips on how you can Optimise your blog post for voice search.

1. Target question keywords and long-tail keywords.
2. Use a conversational tone in your blog post.
3. Include the FAQ section in your blog post.
4. Improve your content readability.
5. Improve loading speed of your website and focus on mobile.

For more information about optimization for voice search, click here.

B] Optimize your blog post for the featured snippet.

One of the main reasons why Google search CTR is decreasing is because of Google’s SERP features called featured snippets.

Take an example here,

Search for anything like, 

how to delete a facebook account

Here is the answer for this in Google.

This way when the question is answered right on the SERP.

Most people don’t click on other results at all.

Another thing about featured snippets is that,

You can rank in position zero on top of all pages and occupy a large area of Google search and increase your visibility of blog online.

This way even though the CTR you get from Google is now approximately 8% it will increase in the future for sure.

And the fact is that,

• According to Ahrefs’ data, ~12.29% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results.

So overall the featured snippets are increasing in number.

You can optimize the featured snippets In your blog post in 3 ways,

• Observe what type of featured snippet is Google showing in the search results for that keyword.
• Replicate the same sort of snippet bait in your blog post.
• Wait for some time to get your page in featured snippets.

Mostly featured snippets are going to be either a one-line answer from the paragraphs of the blog posts or lists or tables showing in the featured snippets more often than not.

C] Optimize your blog post for the SEO rank brain.

Rankbrain is a machine learning AI algorithm That Google started using in 2015 to Improve the search results relevance with the query searched.

Google employee Said that the top 3 ranking factors of Google at present are,

1. Content.
2. Backlinks.
3. Rankbrain.

So you should take rank brain pretty seriously as it can make or break your website rankings in Google.

Rankbrain does two things very well,

1. Understanding the search intent of the keyword.
2. Observing the user interaction with the search results.

You will learn how the rank brain affects traditional keyword research in the next techniques but for now,

Let’s see how you can optimize your blog post for the rank brain.

Because rank brain observes the user interaction with the search results,

You should make sure that your user experience on your website is good.

You can do this by following methods.

• Write short paragraphs in your blog post and format your blog with lots of bullet points and numbered lists.
• Include lots of subheadings and break your blog post into easy to read pieces.
• Include lots of multimedia elements like Screenshots, infographics, and Videos, etc.
• Improve your webpage CTR in search with better headlines and meta description.
• Publish long in-depth blog posts Which will increase the Dwell time of your website.

Look today and in the future of SEO you should focus on User experience more because,

Rankbrain is the top 3rd ranking factor in Google which can change the algorithm ranking factors depending on the User experience Like Backlinks and content freshness.

Irrespective of how many backlinks you have or how good your content be, If your page User experience is bad, You won’t stay on top of Google for a long time.

5. Focus on branding, marketing, and design.

Google loves brands.

You cannot ignore that fact.

This is why, for most of the competitive keywords in Google, you see lots of big brands ranking on top of search results even with fewer backlinks or less quality content.

Google’s objective is to serve the end-users With the best resource of content possible in its Search engine If you observe all the Google updates in its algorithms are some way or the other moving ahead for the betterment of the User experience.

You take, for example, core web vitals update which is to make pages load fast and Improve the security of the website, or panda update which is to Penalize and filter websites with poor content.

Brands are a sign of quality, credibility, and consistency because of which Google likes them as users love brands.

This is why the best SEO technique for the long run is to focus on turning your blogs into brands.

Here are a few steps to make it happen.

• Use a professional-looking well-designed website and logo.
• Increase your presence on social media platforms.
• Leverage search engine marketing.
• Used Canva to create custom images for your website Instead of using stock photos.
• Use Pinterest for traffic.
• Bring a unique perspective on a table in the blog post for users.
• Create high-quality content, Not just text-based blog posts but videos, podcasts, and infographics.
• Encourage branded searches.
• Name your Strategies And build backlinks from highly authoritative and relevant websites.
• Get interviewed by other bloggers And increase collaborations.

With these strategies, you can create your brand and get loved by Google in the long run.

6. Establish EAT.

EAT is Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

It is showing to Google how credible you are as an author of the website, Showing your expertise on the subject.

Because Google is not a human being, it is a machine and AI so you need to talk the language that AI understands well.

And AI understands the language of external signals.

Well, I am talking about backlinks.

Focus on relevance and authority of links.

Here are few other things you need to do to establish EAT of your website.

• Get interviewed by other blogs.
• Create profile backlinks.
• Create in-depth content.
• Focus on the security of your website with optimal speed, uptime and SSL installed.
• Match the search intent of the keyword with your blog post.

Criteria for EAT are becoming more important and expanding to many other websites that fall into other categories like news websites, niche websites, gossip websites other than typical YMYL sites.

So it is always a good practice to establish EAT for your website so that you won’t get penalized by Google in the long run.

7. Focus on technical SEO and local SEO.

Here let’s see both of them in detail.

A] Technical SEO.

Never ignore Technical SEO as it’s a big ranking factor in Google because it is related to the crawling and indexing of your website.

It continues to be a big ranking factor in Google in the upcoming years as well.

Some of the important things that you need to do in technical SEO are,

• Make your website HTTPS.
• Make your website load fast.
• Remove thin and duplicate content on your website.
• Improve site structure and navigation of your website.
• Improve structured data.
• Check and fix broken links on your website.
• Add 301 Redirects where it is necessary.

You should make sure that your technical SEO is good.

B] Local SEO.

The stats are that,

• 59% of consumers use Google every month to find a reputable, local business.

If you have a local business should consider a local SEO on your website.

Here are a few tips for that,

• Focus on targeting local keywords.
• Create Google my business account.
• Get positive reviews and ratings for your local business.
• Use online business directories listings.
• Optimize for voice search.

For more information about local SEO click here.

8. Focus on topic research instead of Keyword research.

Look,

SEO back in 2010, was about keywords, keyword stuffing, and lots of backlinks and you will rank on Google.

But SEO has changed now.

Today you don’t need to have to do Keyword stuffing in your blog post to rank high on Google.

Back in 2010, you had to target each keyword in different blog posts to be able to rank for different keywords in Google.

But today due to the rank brain-machine learning algorithm.

You can rank a single blog post for literally Thousands of keywords other than your target keyword in Google.

You don’t need to target different keywords in different blog posts to be able to rank high for different terms in Google,

Before the rank brain Algorithm update in 2015, 

Whenever somebody searches Something in Google, Google would crawl billions of pages Looking at exact match terms or keywords in those pages and analyzing them in terms of backlinks, and ranking those pages in search results.

Today, because the rank brain is in the game.

Rankbrain goes one step ahead from looking at exact match term in web pages it tries to Understand the search intent and Concept behind the keyword.

Look,

• 15% of searches in Google are new and never searched before.

In such a case, the rank brain is still showing the relevant results in search.

Because

It understands the search intent, analyses the data that it already has turned the keywords into concepts and matches that data with the new search and shows the results relevant to it.

Today if you search in Google something like,

• WordPress class.
• WordPress course.

You will get similar results in both searches.

So what you should do is to,

Focus on doing topic research.

Don’t obsess too much on keywords now.

Because if you focus on topics Covering everything related to the topic with including all the LSI keywords in it It making it a deep resource for the topic.

You will rank for thousands of other terms similar to the topic in Google.

Here is the best example for a keyword called,

Blogging mistakes.

This keyword of HubSpot ranks 1 in Google for the target term but apart from the target keyword,

The blog post ranks for thousands of other different terms in Google.

Another thing is passage indexing update in Google,

With passage indexing, you can rank multiple keywords in Google within a single blog post.

So overall,

Don’t obsess over Keywords,

Focus on the topics and you will do good and target each topic in different blog posts, not different phrases or keywords.

9. Build a diversified backlinks profile.

There are two important things that you need to do when it comes to backlinks to your website.

• Internal backlinks.
• External backlinks.

The reason you have to diversify your external backlink profile is because of,

It looks more natural and organic.

And you can avoid getting your website penalized by google.

Let’s first understand the external backlinks of your website.

The number 1 rule for building external backlinks is,

You should only build backlinks from highly Authoritative websites relevant to your niche.

A single backlink from these sites Is equal to 100 unauthoritative and irrelevant Websites.

When it comes to the diversity of Backlinks profile, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Vary the anchor text of backlinks.
• Get a handful of NO-FOLLOW links as well.
• Get backlinks from images, infographics, and other visual assets.
• Get profile backlinks.
• Get backlinks from association partnerships, sponsorships, and interviews.
• Get backlinks from web directories.
• Get both high-quality and low-quality links.

Talking about internal backlink structure,

You should always interlink your highly linked pages to all those pages which did not acquire many backlinks.

Like backlink from In-depth articles to product pages To pass the link juice and authority.

The benefits of a good internal backlink structure are that,

• It helps users find more information about that topic on your blog.
• It establishes EAT of your blog.
• It makes Google’s crawlers easily crawl and index your web pages.
• It passes link juice and page rank.

With, interlinking as well, you have to apply the same formula, vary anchor text, and location of linking.

10. Blog on a single niche and analyze the growth.

Avoid blogging on multiple topics on a website.

Just stick to a single topic and cover everything related to the topic in a blog.

This way you have More chances of exceeding on Google search And driving traffic to your website other than blogging on multiple topics.

• You are a go-to resource for that topic to your audience.
• You build authority and expertise on the subject.
• You have targeted traffic which increases conversion rates.

Use Google search console and Google Analytics to analyze the growth of your website.

And only work on things that produced results like traffic, backlinks, rankings.

Avoid other things and repeat the process.

Let’s conclude the blog now.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered everything related to which SEO techniques are best for the long run.

Do comment down what you think about what else are the best SEO techniques best for the long run.

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Read my other blogs,

• What to do after keyword Research and writing content?
• Pros and cons of building backlinks.
• Best web hosting for startups.

I will catch you next time,

Till then keep learning and keep growing.