We’ve all seen it. The company that starts out with a strong SEO strategy, putting large amounts of time and effort into building up their ranking in search engines. They start ranking well for competitive keywords and a good share of traffic starts coming from organic search results until progress slows and organic traffic stops growing.
The “SEO plateau” affects almost every business that uses search engine marketing as part of its marketing strategy. Getting past the plateau is one of the greatest challenges of online businesses, but Alexander Kesler has the answer.
How to Overcome the SEO Plateau
Hopefully, your business has already achieved strong content and high ranking through SEO. That way, you don’t have to put much effort into keeping things on track. If you’re starting to see your rankings plateau, consider adding the following tactics to your strategy.
Identify new keywords and create content to rank for them.
When you rank well for particular keywords, it’s a sign that search engines have identified your website as an original and valuable source of information. If your content is ranking well for competitive keywords, then it’s very likely that creating content that targets long-tail (and hence less-competitive) keywords will allow you to quickly achieve prominent rankings for those as well.
Ensure better-looking search results in SERPs.
Many people don’t realize how important the appearance—the “look”—of content is in SERPs (search engine results pages). Work to improve your meta titles and descriptions, and make sure you compare your efforts to that of your competitors’.
Aim for multiple rankings.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that some websites rank with multiple pieces of content for a particular search result. Although you should focus your efforts on getting just one piece of content to rank for a particular keyword, achieving multiple rankings would be ideal.
Target a larger audience.
Even though you probably have a good idea of who your customers are, it won’t hurt to analyze your client base to see whether there are customer segments that hold potential for growth.
Examining the audiences your competitors are reaching, along with the combination of keywords, content types, and messaging they’re using, will also provide you with valuable information and ideas related to expanding your audience.
Analyze the default traffic funnels.
Most major analytics services, including Google Analytics, allow you to track data related to how visitors use your site, including where they land, how long they stay, what their “path” is on your site from page to page, and how many of them convert to email subscribers or even customers.
Use that information to find what pages drive the highest-converting traffic and use that information to figure out the best ways to close the sale with them. When you have a better understanding of this side of your business, you can invest more of your resources into getting traffic to those pages and improving their content.
Conclusion
What’s a guaranteed way to break through the SEO plateau? Continually create new, high-quality content.
Improvements in the algorithms of search engines over the past few years have enabled them to achieve tremendous sophistication; accordingly, as Google and its competitors get better at determining content quality, they’ll be even more willing to adjust their algorithms to reward sites that go the extra mile.
For marketers, it’s especially important to cultivate the habit of listening to the audience and understanding how their needs and priorities are changing. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of the curve and give you more ideas for creating new content to improve your SEO performance.
