SEO or search engine optimization remains a top way for marketers to be discovered online. Marketers spend billions of dollars trying to improve their position on the search engine results pages (SERP), but your clients can rock their SEO outcomes by paying attention to a few specific details.

• The Featured Snippet
• Keyword Stuffing
• Too Much Content
• Patience

If you’re offering SEO services, make sure you’re investing time and energy as you help clients achieve a better outcome from this marketing strategy.

The Featured Snippet

A coreDNA post underscores what many of us already know. Marketers are obsessed about moving up on the SERP page. It’s definitely important to be on the first page of results. Once you have a client on that page, focus on “maximizing the click-​through rate” instead of struggling to get to the top position on the page. Your clients’ customers will notice if they appear in the featured snippet box. The structure of the content matters when you’re aiming for a position in the featured snippet box. If the key phrase in a blog post asks a question, the answer should appear early on in the content. Taking that approach will improve the chances of appearing in that important featured snippet box.

The Problem with Keyword Stuffing

In your zest to get your client’s site to rank for a specific keyword, the end experience for users can turn bleak. Instead of seeing a clearly worded post about how to solve a problem, readers might encounter a few garbled sentences that never get to the point. If that’s happening with your client’s site, remember the end goal. Of course, you want them to rank on the first page of the SERP. But you also want their readers to click-​through to the site and possibly reach out for a sales call or presentation. That means posting high quality content designed to answer a user’s question and backing away from an intense keyword stuffing agenda.

Too Much Content

Some of your clients might be convinced that more content is always better in their zest to achieve SEO excellence. They may have spent thousands of staff hours developing content. But this approach doesn’t always lead to success. Joy Hawkins explains that “adding too much low-​value content can have the opposite effect for SMBs and local businesses.” Hawkins describes one marketer that created a page for every city in a local area. They hoped the “keyword and location” strategy would drive traffic. Because the marketer had no inbound or outbound links on their posts, the search engines couldn’t find these pages during their crawl. This huge SEO effort didn’t attract the hoped-​for traffic. 

Hawkins also points out that if the business had set up a few test pages first, they could have determined how well the approach was working. And then, they could have adjusted their strategy quickly. When the experts deleted the multiple similar pages and focused on keywords on the main page, their ‘pack rankings’ improved tremendously, but that didn’t happen overnight.

Winning at SEO Requires Patience

Any marketer that launches a promotional campaign gets an adrenaline fix when the results are almost immediate. Spurred by the excitement of a 10% discount or a BOGO, consumers start buying and the marketer can point to advertising success.

Realizing results from an SEO campaign can take much longer, as in up to a year, especially if clients are using high-​ranking keywords. Analysts report that “Only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top 10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword.”  Your clients can have much better results and achieve a Top 10 listing within 2 to 6 months if they use techniques such as backlinks.

Your Clients Can Rock Their SEO Outcomes

You can help clients see the popularity of specific keywords by running a Digital Audit in AdMall by SalesFuel. From there, you can start a broader discussion on how to run an SEO program that yields results in addition to position on the SERP.