Many SEMs tend to get wrapped up in content creation and link building as ways to push rankings. While these SEO tasks are important and crucial to the success of a website, there are other smaller tasks that are equally important and will have similar impact.
While these won’t replace link building or content creation, they can supplement your monthly SEO tasks to grow even further.
Disavow Bad Backlinks
Not all backlinks are created equally. If you have a lot of backlinks from low quality websites will hurt you. You might have not created those links, or even known where they came from, but it doesn’t matter. Google is an algorithm, they are indiscriminate about who they flag for bad backlinks.
Using Google’s Search Console or tools like SEM Rush / Moz can help you find out what sites are linking to you. If there are a lot of questionable ones, disavow them with the Google disavow tool.
Create Videos (Then Optimize Them)
The vast majority of internet traffic comes from video. If you are looking for SEO signals from Google, having engagement on YouTube helps them know that your content is of high value. So start making video content to grow the diversity of your content, but don’t forget to optimize it like you would your blogs.
Take the time to write a helpful description and include links to your website where folks can learn more. The same rules of “internal linking” apply even when the content is hosted on YouTube.
Leverage Your Best Content
We’ve all got that one blog that gets tons of traffic. So how are you leveraging it to keep it strong and then converting? Are you writing supporting blogs that are canonicalized to show Google that this is the most important piece of content in that subject matter? These kind of internal linking strategies can help showcase content that will convert users and meet the goals of SEO, which are more sales.
Steal From Your Competitors
Do you have a competitor who’s got content that you’d like to rank for? Steal the idea. Just do a better job of creating that similar content. If they have 4 outbound links, do 5 better ones. If they have generic examples and images, use higher quality and more useful ones. “Real artists steal” isn’t just for designers, marketers can leverage their competitor’s work to help themselves too.
Focus on Accessibility
Alt image tags aren’t just for Google, you know. Lots of people use these tools every day to help them use the internet. The benefit is now two fold. Not only do you get to have your website be more useable for folks with impairments, Google won’t be too upset with it either.
Why? It’s reading your website in a similar way as a lot of screen readers. So those descriptive tags, and easy navigation items that you were primarily using to help those who need it, now help the search engines navigate your site better.
Conclusion
There will never be a replacement for link building and page optimization, but these items can enhance your links and content by rounding out your SEO strategy. There are tons of other things you can do, but these simple SEO tasks will help you get where you need to go in the search engines with less effort.