These two sides of SEO are called white hat and black hat, and you can guess what they both mean. When marketers sell too much in their content, the reader becomes skeptical about the information. It takes time to build an audience and generate momentum, so marketers need to have the proper expectations before they begin. Check out what happened to one company that got impatient, canceled our services, and hopped back on when their traffic began to spike.

• Our holistic OmniSEO approach will get you where you need to be and provide the tracking tools you need to see it.
• To rank high on the SERP, you need to understand how search engines work.
• If your site structure is clear and content is regularly refreshed, crawlers are more likely to find all your pages.

I even ran some of their top-ranking articles through Originality AI to detect if they used any LLMs to generate the content. And eventually, I did start ranking on the first page for “digital marketing jobs”. Because we know how tough marketing can get, we’ve created this handy guide for you based on our 25++ years of experience in the industry. When it comes to localized content, the most common mistake we see businesses make is creating duplicate content. Instead of producing a unique page for each of its service areas, the business will make a page where the only difference is the service area. Instead of exploring the best water parks, someone wants to find a water park near them.

SEO vs. Social Media

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in a while), you’ll put more wood behind fewer arrows. Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Supercharge your own tools and dashboards with leading SEO metrics

The primary keyword can also be used in 1-2 subheadings, as well as throughout the body of your blog. But, as we mentioned above, don’t overuse it or you could be penalized. The H1 tag is in the body of your content while the title tag is at the top of the page. The title tag is what’s displayed at the top of your browser and appears when your page is listed on Google.

In other words, your website may perform worse in Google if you don’t use HTTPS. If you’re not sure how to create a sitemap and your website runs on WordPress (which it most probably does), we recommend creating the sitemap with the Yoast SEO plugin. People are used to navigating through websites in a certain way and you should make this process as easy and clear as possible for them. Even if it wasn’t your case, an update is a relatively easy way to improve the quality of your content, which is never a bad thing to do.

Choose a website builder with built-in SEO tools and consider consulting an SEO and content strategy expert for guidance. Basic SEO skills can take your online store far, but advanced techniques can dramatically boost your traffic and conversions. While fundamental SEO—like setting up Google Search Console and doing keyword research—improves search visibility, advanced strategies help you fine-tune performance for meaningful growth. The true SEO value lies in its power to generate sustainable, long-term results. Unlike paid advertising, which stops the moment you stop paying, a well-executed SEO strategy builds momentum over time, creating a durable asset for your business.

Understand what your company’s stakeholders want from search engine optimization and use those as a baseline for creating specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals. While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Black hat strategies let you cut down the complexity of link building, for example. Keyword BHS Links stuffing helps users to rank one page for many keywords without having to create more content.

Your first step is to figure out the keyword difficulty of each term on your list. Well, there’s no magic formula that’s going to show you the perfect keyword from your list. And you’ll get more detail on the topic, including estimated monthly search volume. You can easily find dozens of trending topics and keywords with a free tool called Exploding Topics. That’s why I recommend trying a few tools that specialize in bubbling up burning questions that people have. A list that would be even better and more complete with a link to my SEO audit post.

For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings. “White hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

Perform an SEO Site Audit

Stoica provides an example of what this looks like in practice. They then meet weekly to discuss their progress and bottlenecks. The 40% in question refers to a large number of websites (many of which received manual actions) that published unhelpful AI-generated content, which Google ultimately viewed as spam. Again, it makes sense, as the search engine needs a way to assess the company’s location. For example, this article in Entrepreneur mentions our Not Another State of Marketing Report page. It also links to it, allowing their readers to see other stats than the one quoted.