6 Effective Strategies to Jump Start Your SEO

It’s not always easy for a new website to rank; in fact, it can be quite difficult. A lot of marketers will tell you that SEO is a long-term strategy, which is true in most cases. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t jump start your SEO to help things move along quicker. We want to go over some website pre-launch techniques, to help you gain the most traction in your SEO efforts.

Set A Goal

Before you can even begin to think about SEO or marketing, you need to determine what kind of goal you are trying to achieve. This can be anything from getting users to sign up for your newsletter, to increasing your podcast listeners, to driving traffic to your blog, to, of course, increase sales. Once you have a clear goal in mind, it’s going to be much easier to determine how to proceed with your marketing efforts.

Determine Your Audience

This goes hand-in-hand with your goal. Once you know what your goal is, you can figure out the audience that you are trying to draw in, to help you achieve that goal. This is where you will start to conduct keyword research, to determine what types of queries your audience will be searching for. If you want to drive traffic to your blog or podcast, what is your content about? What might someone search for to find that type of information? When it comes to trying to make sales, what types of searches might someone use when they are in the buying phase of their journey? Once you can narrow down the keywords your audience uses, you can then start optimizing your site for those terms.

Optimize For Search Intent

One mistake that a lot of SEOs make is optimizing their site for a particular search term, instead of the intent behind the search. There are three types of search intent:

1. Navigational
2. Informational
3. Transactional

Navigational:

This is the type of search that someone would perform when they want to go to a specific site or page. So, for example, if someone wanted to go to the Target website, they would just enter “Target” into the search bar.

Informational:

This is the type of query that someone would use when they want to find the answer to something. Some examples of this are “how to lose weight,” or “does the KETO diet really work."

Transactional:

This is the type of query that someone would use when they want to do something. This could be anything from wanting to buy something, to signing up for a webinar or downloading software. Some examples of this might be “best yoga pants,” or “LuluLemon vs Fabletics."

Now that you can better understand what search intent your audience may be using, you can strategically optimize for those searches. When it comes to navigational intent, you likely won’t have the brand recognition for this type of query yet, but if you do, you will want to make sure your landing pages clearly state who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

When it comes to optimizing for informational intent, this one is quite simple. If you see that your audience frequently searches for “how to lose weight,” you can include that search phrase in your title tag.

For transactional queries, you want to keep your optimizations focused on your desired outcome, like making a purchase. Some key action words to use are:

• Discount
• Coupon
• Free shipping
• Top
• Best
• Sale
• Buy
• Affordable
• Deal
• Comparison
• Cheapest
• Review

Prepare Content

Creating copy is key to Google finding your site relevant for the search queries you want to rank for. A lot of sites make the mistake of having too little copy, and not providing enough information to their users. You want to build out your copy for landing pages, but also have up to 10 blog posts prepared for site launch.

Take your time creating long-form content, and ensure that it’s well-researched and in-depth. This will likely be the longest step here, but it also yields the greatest results. You don’t want to stop publishing copy after your site has launched, but starting off with some well-crafted articles will certainly help Google better understand your website, and what it’s about.

NAP Citations

This is especially true if you are a local business. NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number. Search engines use this information to determine which listings to show in geo-targeted searches. You will want to make sure you are signed up to NAP citations, such as Google My Business, Yelp, Bing Places, and more. You always want to have all of your social media profiles updated with this information. It’s important to keep all of your NAP information consistent, so search engines can validate that you are a legitimate business.

Guest Blog

One large ranking factor is of course, links. You don’t want to create overly self-promotional and borderline spammy guest posts. You really want to take the time and effort into creating a well-crafted and information piece that someone will be happy to link to. By guest blogging the right way, you can earn some high-quality links, generate traffic, and establish yourself as an authority.

One last tip is to always monitor your results. Check for crawl issues, 404 pages, broken links, dips in traffic, or drops in keyword rankings. Assess the problem and how you can fix it, and continually test and tweak your strategy.