Mike Templeman — February 21, 2017 Follow @miketempleman1When you’re practicing SEO, it can be quite frustrating to note how often things change. In the SEO world, there are always new techniques and new ideas. Everyone wants their website to get found by new consumers. Everyone wants to go viral, sometimes just for the sake of going viral and sometimes in order to raise their bottom line.
It can be quite easy to get sucked into the world of more and more hits. And “hits” here refer to the number of people who check out a certain piece of content. As to whether getting more “hits really helps to increase sales or achieve your long-term goals remains to be seen.
In the internet world, a piece that goes viral today can very easily disappear tomorrow, unless you keep putting in consistent effort to produce new content. Eventually, it’s the continuity with which you update your website and add new information that works for you in the SEO world. You have to keep adapting to internet trends, adopting the ones that work for you and weeding out the rest.
Here are a few techniques you might want to try in 2017:
Providing Actionable Information
Nowadays, it’s still possible to find websites where the writing is very promotional—something that today’s savvy customers have learned to look through in a minute. And, at times, you’ll find websites which are full of jargon intended to impress the consumer. Unfortunately it usually has the opposite effect—it alienates the consumer instead.
- Replace Promotional Writing and Jargon with Information: It’s easy enough to leave out promotional writing and jargon but what do you replace them with? At one point of time, the obvious answer, in SEO circles, was information. The idea was to provide the consumer with as much information as possible, to give away trade secrets and to share tips, techniques and ideas. This is still a good way to find customers because everyone is looking for more information which will help them to improve their lives.
- Make the Information Actionable: It is also possible to “dump” too much information on your consumer. No one wants to read paragraphs and paragraphs full of information about minor details that they can’t put into action in their daily lives. So, while it might be a good idea to give your customer more information, it’s also necessary to make sure that information is actionable. How-tos never really go out of fashion, whether they’re restating the basics or talking about something new.
Creating New Content
Has your website been more or less static for the last couple of years? This might explain why you got a flood of new customers when you set it up but that number kept decreasing as time went on. Like it or not, the internet loves new content. People love new content. Search engines love new content. And eventually, your bottom line is only going to rise when you add new content.
- Nothing New to Add? But I don’t have anything new to add, you might say. All the information I wanted to put up about my product and my company is on there. And it’s a good website! I just don’t understand why people don’t seem to like it anymore. Business owners can often be heard lamenting the fact that their website isn’t bringing them the results they want.
- How to Change Up Your Internet Presence: There are many ways in which you can do something new on the internet. Add a new blog post. Start a social media page if you don’t have one. Try out a new form of social media. Add some new comments on social media. If nothing else, at least change up the colors of your website or add some new images. Anything new you do is going to make people more interested in you. Of course, you do need to make sure that you’re not adding new content which is sloppy, untrue or not in keeping with your brand.
- Managing Your Internet Presence: It’s usually necessary to have someone with some internet smarts to manage your online presence. This can be you, one of your employees or a digital agency you’ve employed for this purpose. Nowadays companies often employ “Social Media Analysts” whose job it is to keep updating the company’s social media pages. Whether you employ a full-time person for this purpose is up to you. But it is important to keep trying out new things on the internet.
Recycling Old Content
Sometimes, you don’t need to create new content to get more hits. You just need to recycle old content. There may be a blog post you had written a long time ago, which attracted a lot of visitors. If the topic is still current, you could use some of the same information in that old blog post but add a new spin to it to create a new blog post.
- Combining Old and New Information to Create a Series: Let’s say you wrote an article about how to use storytelling in SEO. And maybe this article attracted a lot of hits. You could follow it up with another article on the same theme. The new article could be about great examples of storytelling on the internet. Or it could be about different elements of storytelling. Or, if you feel like playing the devil’s advocate, you could even write about why storytelling doesn’t work. In all these examples, you can use some elements/ideas from the original article and add a little more, creating a series of sorts. You must have noticed how series do really well in books and movies. Why not the internet?
- How Writers Recycle Content in Fiction: Writers have been using this technique of recycling old content for a long time. For example, there are many modern retellings of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. In each of them, some of the old material is retained and new material is added to create a combination of old and new. This can be your new SEO mantra—combining old and new.
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