With SEO, the goal posts are always changing. That’s why staying ahead of the game and proactively executing effective SEO tactics is crucial. While trends may come and go, there are certain strategies that stand the test of time.
In this post, we’ll discuss five evergreen SEO tactics that continue to yield impressive results and are worth weaving into your digital strategy.
We can count on them to bring new ideas to the table consistently
5 Evergreen SEO Tactics That Just Work
Let’s explore these five keystone techniques that will help boost your website’s visibility and rankings.
1) Good Content and Links: The Cornerstones of SEO
To create good content:
- Start by seeking to understand your audience’s pain points, interests and search intent:
- Then conduct thorough keyword research and keyword analysis to identify the topics and keywords that align with your target market.
- Finally, craft compelling articles, blog posts, videos or other forms of content that provide in-depth information, answer common questions or offer unique insights.
While the importance of links in SEO has evolved, they remain a vital factor in determining your website’s credibility and authority. Quality links from reputable websites act as endorsements, signaling to search engines that your content is trustworthy and valuable.
When authoritative sites link to your pages, it enhances your chances of ranking higher in search results:
However, it’s crucial to approach link building with caution and integrity. In the early days of SEO, practitioners attempted to manipulate rankings by engaging in questionable tactics like buying links or participating in link schemes. These “black hat” SEO techniques violated search engine guidelines and ultimately led to penalties and diminished rankings.
Today, search engines like Google have gotten more clever in identifying and penalizing these manipulations.
So, instead, focus on building organic, natural links by creating outstanding content that naturally attracts links from other relevant and authoritative sources:
This can be achieved through strategies like guest blogging, creating shareable infographics or reaching out to influencers or industry experts for collaborations.
Dive Deeper: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About 10x Content
2) Keep Your Content Up to Date
Search engines like Google strive to deliver the most relevant and timely results to their users. As a result, they prioritize websites that regularly update their content, ensuring it remains accurate, informative and up to date (aka “fresh content”).
Regularly updating your content has become essential for maintaining and improving your rankings. That could include:
- Rewriting the intro and conclusion
- Deleting/combining any weak sections
- Researching and writing as much as you feel would add to the value of the piece
- Updating any stats/facts/quotes and make sure all links to sources are no more than ~2 years old
- Replacing any outdated or irrelevant images
- Replacing any examples/case studies with new, current ones
Here are three reasons why you should make it a priority:
- Enhanced Visibility: With an abundance of content available online, search engines like Google strive to deliver the most relevant and timely results to their users. This can significantly boost your website’s visibility in search results and increase organic traffic.
- Relevance and Accuracy: As industries evolve and new information emerges, it’s crucial to ensure that your content remains accurate and up to date. This helps to maintain the relevance and reliability of your content, positioning your website as a trusted resource for both users and search engines.
- Authority and Trust: When you consistently update and revise your content, you demonstrate a commitment to providing valuable and current information to your audience. This dedication to accuracy and relevance helps build trust and establishes your website as an authoritative source in your industry. Search engines recognize this and are more likely to reward your efforts with higher rankings and improved visibility.
If you make content updates a regular part of your SEO strategy, you will be able to stay ahead of the competition, attract more organic traffic, and strengthen your website’s authority and credibility.
Dive Deeper: Why You Should Update Content – Or Risk Losing The Traffic You Have [Case Study]
3) Harness the Power of Internal Links
Internal links are a powerful yet often underestimated tool in your SEO arsenal. They contribute significantly to your website’s structure, user experience and search engine optimization.
While external backlinks from other websites are valuable for establishing authority, internal links serve a different purpose — they help search engine crawlers navigate and understand the relevance and structure of your content within your own site.
One key aspect of internal linking is establishing a strong site structure via your content:
A well-organized website with clear categories, sections and subpages creates a logical framework that search engines can easily comprehend. Utilizing breadcrumbs, which are navigational aids displaying the user’s current position within the website hierarchy, can further enhance the user experience and help search engines understand the relationship between pages.
Additionally, internal linking allows you to guide search engine crawlers and users to related or relevant content within your site. By recommending related posts, articles or products on your web pages, you facilitate seamless navigation and encourage users to explore more of your website’s offerings:
From an SEO perspective, these internal links provide signals to search engines about the importance and context of the linked content, improving the overall visibility and relevance of your pages in search results.
Remember, the goal is to create a seamless and intuitive browsing experience for both visitors and search engines, guiding them to the most relevant and engaging content your website has to offer.
4) Content Pruning: Quality over Quantity
Content pruning involves selectively removing or combining outdated or irrelevant content to optimize your website’s SEO performance.
Here are four reasons why we think content pruning should be a part of your SEO strategy:
- Quality over Quantity: Rather than focusing on producing a large volume of content, prioritize quality. Content pruning allows you to eliminate low-performing pages or those with overlapping topics, ensuring that your website offers valuable and relevant information to users.
Image Source: NP Digital
- Improved User Experience: By decluttering your website and removing outdated or redundant content, you create a more streamlined and user-friendly experience. Visitors can easily find the most relevant and engaging content, leading to increased engagement and longer browsing sessions.
- Enhanced Search Engine Visibility: Search engines prefer websites with high-quality, authoritative content. By removing low-value pages and focusing on high-performing content, you signal to search engines that your website is a trusted source. This can lead to improved visibility and higher rankings in search results.
- Increased Organic Traffic: Pruning your content allows search engines to better understand the purpose and relevance of your website’s pages. If you align your content with search intent and remove irrelevant pages, you will attract more targeted organic traffic from users actively seeking the information you provide.
Content pruning should be an ongoing process as your website evolves and new data becomes available. Regularly assess your content’s performance, eliminate underperforming pages, and consolidate similar topics to ensure that your website remains optimized for both users and search engines.
5) Engaging Content Formats: Trends, Alternatives and Comparisons
When it comes to top-of-the-funnel content, incorporating trends and statistics can be highly effective. Users often seek up-to-date information and insights on industry trends, making this type of content, particularly engaging.
For lower-funnel content, it’s essential to focus on alternatives, comparisons, and lists of the best products or services within your industry.
At this stage, users are likely to conduct research and seek specific solutions or recommendations. This type of content format is not only highly engaging but also increases the chances of driving conversions and attracting qualified leads.
It’s important to note that these content formats are not mutually exclusive, and you shouldn’t limit yourself to just one.
Explore what works best in your particular niche and replicate successful formats while keeping the user intent in mind. By continuously adapting to user preferences and intent, you can create content that resonates with your audience, drives organic traffic, and positions your website as a go-to resource in your industry.
Dive Deeper: 17 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
Bonus Tip: Translation
While the strategies discussed so far are foundational, it’s worth mentioning an advanced SEO tactic — translation.
If your target audience spans multiple languages or regions, translating your content can expand your reach and drive additional traffic:
A successful translation strategy goes beyond content alone. It involves optimizing metadata, URLs and other technical elements for each language or region, as well as implementing hreflang tags to indicate the language and geographical targeting of your content.
These technical aspects ensure that search engines properly understand and index your multilingual content.
Final Thoughts on Our Go-to SEO Tactics
These top five SEO tactics are fairly simple activities that yield predictable and reliable results.
When you’re thinking about different search engine optimization approaches, it’s wise to incorporate a medley of tried-and-true methods, such as the ones we’ve laid out, but it’s also worth exploring some more volatile tactics as well.
Constantly tweak, test and stay updated on which SEO tactics are favorable for other brands. If they work for them, they may just work for your brand as well.
If you’re ready to level up your brand through SEO, Single Grain’s SEO experts can help!👇
Repurposed from our Marketing School podcast.
