Keywords Are Irrelevant; Time to Re-evaluate Your SEO

In the ever-shifting landscape of SEO, business owners may get a bit of a shock to learn that keyword ranking no longer holds any measurable metrics to gauge your website's online success, the focus has resettled on more expressive, long-tail keywords. With this revelation, you should take the time to re-examine your SEO practices to make sure your attention is focused on the measurements that really matter.

Any redirection you or your SEO provider chooses will greatly depend on what you want to achieve through optimization. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure your online success based on your main goals. From increasing your website's visibility, marketing your brand, driving new customers to your site, gaining brand awareness, marketing new or existing products or simply keeping and upselling current customers; your bottom-line success online will be measured through different metrics that carry differing degrees of importance for your specific goals.

Measuring Organic Growth and Actual Conversions

Organic growth measurement, sans keyword ranking, can be assessed through increased website visibility and organic search relevancy. Evaluate the number of new site visitors for both organic search parameters and within your target market to make sure you see an increase each month and from year to year. These type of organic and targeted numbers equal the quality visitors you're looking for that will turn into actual conversions.

What You Can Do to Steer Your Site in the Right Direction

Online marketing and SEO done the right way will provide you with a fantastic foundation to build your business and online reputation with measurable success. Choosing a reputable SEO company with options to direct your KPIs to align with your specific goals is the best way to achieve success online. With or without SEO representation, you should be familiar with the most important elements to build an effective SEO strategy:

• Relevant and Unique Website Content - Great website content that is relevant and engaging will draw the interest of potential customers like a magnet and your unique content creation is rewarded by Google with boosted SEO rankings. Combined with important long-tail keywords, your content can direct consumers with your unique expertise and even target those searching for local businesses.
• Title Tags from Actual Business Metrics - Choosing a homepage title tag is an important decision that should focus on the main product or service that drives your revenue. Your title tag should be based from actual business metrics and include geo-location keywords to specifically target local consumers.
• Quality Backlinks, Not Quantity - A focus on quality backlinks over quantity will help your website's domain authority and vital recognition for Google's algorithm. Comparing your site's domain authority to that of your competitors will give you a good idea about where your site ranks in Google.
• Look Up, Correct and Monitor Your Business Listings - The information found in your business listings in Google, Bing Places, Yelp, Yahoo Local and other directories should be consistent and correct to prove that you are indeed a legitimate business and will improve your overall ranking.

What to Avoid Like the Plague

Whether you are producing your own content or pay your SEO provider for content creation, make certain that it is not coming from a content mill or spit out from an article spinner. If you are unsure, it may be a good idea to have an analysis of your site to ensure you have a solid foundation without content or spammy links that Google may deem manipulative or unnecessary. Here are the top three things to avoid like the plague:

• Duplicated content, like geo-specific pages with almost identical content to target each of your service areas no longer carry the advantage they once did, consider instead simply naming your service locations on one main services page.
• Unnecessary pages like dedicated services pages that tediously break down each service can appear redundant and unnecessary. Use analytics to identify what site pages have the least website traffic, these are the pages you may want to consider losing.
• Spammy backlinks from undesirable spam directory sites and offshore link building efforts are viewed by Google as manipulative and may lead to a Google Penalty.

Providing users with the best possible experience through targeted search results is the main focus of Google and therefore, should also be your main focus. Google customizes search results for each individual with RankBrain, an artificial intelligence that analyzes location, search history and other factors to provide better, intuitive results. Even though these results seem less predictable, learning how to effectively grade and upgrade your website's SEO will provide far-reaching benefits for your bottom line and keep your website in good favor with Google. Find the power of search engine optimization for yourself, contact SEO Pros for a free website analysis at (801) 413-7734 today.

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