Sustainability has become somewhat of a buzzword in the modern business landscape – however, it doesn’t always have to mean office recycling and green initiatives. In this article, we’re focussing on the sustainability of your SEO marketing strategy – that is, how future-proof your SEO plan is, and how it contributes to both immediate and long term marketing activity and business wins.
But before we share our tips and best practices for sustainable SEO growth, it’s first important to understand what it means to create a sustainable SEO strategy and why it’s important.
What is a sustainable SEO strategy and why is it important?
A sustainable SEO strategy is one which can withstand the constant change and upheaval within the marketing realm, which is reflected in trends and changing algorithms. SEO is an area of your marketing plan which deals with how your website ranks on search engines, and while there are many key aspects which remain the same, there are regular updates to the algorithms of these search engines which need to be considered.
As such, a sustainable SEO strategy needs to be flexible and adaptable – rolling with the changes rather than trying to fight them, and proving to Google and other search engines that your business can continue to remain up to date and valuable to customers and clients alike.
With that said, what are the best practices for ensuring long term and sustainable SEO growth?
1. Optimise security
Security is one of those factors which will never go out of fashion – in fact, with hacking and the risk of online scams at an all-time high, and with scammers more sophisticated than ever before, security has taken on an increasingly crucial role in the SEO success of every business.
It doesn’t matter what industry you operate in or what information you collect from customers and online visitors: if you want to demonstrate to search engines that your website is safe for users, you need to employ the very best security measures.
2. Prioritise User Experience (UX)
The introduction of Google Core Web Vitals highlighted the importance of user experience as an integral part of an SEO strategy; forcing website owners to consider everything from the stability of each component on each webpage, to page load speeds and how responsive individual buttons and CTAs are.
Today, user experience remains of the utmost importance in creating a website with high performing and sustainable SEO merits.
3. Great and varied content
We’ve already touched on how important it is for websites to provide value to customers and consumers if they want to perform well on Google and through their SEO. But with the rise in different content formats, including video and audio as well as integrated social media channels and other engagement outlets and tools, businesses need to embrace valuable content as an important part of their sustainable SEO strategy.
The more that you can deliver in the way of valuable and high performing content, the better your SEO will perform. For many businesses, this means spreading content across a wide and versatile selection of platforms, expanding and optimising audience reach with fresh and renewed content which is tailored towards each target audience.
4. On-page and technical basics
This is a fundamental factor to consider when looking to boost your SEO and ensure that your strategy is sustainable – however, it is so often overlooked in favour of the more complex details which are laid on top.
In short, if the foundation and skeleton of your website and online presence is not sufficiently optimised, every bit of content that you layer over the top will be diluted. So, one of the best things you can do to is to audit your site to ensure that it has been set up with best technical and on-page SEO practices in mind.
This includes things such as meta data, structured data, optimised images - to name just a few.
If you are unsure about how to get started with SEO for your business website, get in touch with the team at Social Loop today.