Search engine optimization has become an important factor in the digital marketing circles. It ensures that a website appears high on the results returned by search engines. SEO marketers spend hours on onsite and technical SEO projects. Offsite projects are equally necessary for the success of a digital marketing campaign.
The top SEO marketers agree in unison that they spend most of their time doing content creation and it is the most labor-intensive tasks of all SEO activities. The tasks involved in content creation include creating quality content, keyword research, editing metadata, building the relevant backlinks for an SEO project, mobile optimization and a host of many other activities.
1) Current SEO Challenges
On a challenge chart, 28.5% of the SEO marketers considered building the relevant backlinks, 17.9% creating quality content, 17.9% mobile optimization, 13% is data, 10.6% is UX, 5.7% is SEO searches, while duplicating content and editing metadata were the least challenging both standing at 3.3%. This is an effort to recapture lost ground for SEO activities as well as get strong on the fundamentals of a more holistic approach to SEO.
2) Future Aspirations
One thing that was evident from the SEO marketers in the survey, many of them want the ability to adapt quickly to rapid change, integrate SEO with other marketing disciplines and to understand the minds behind the search queries on search engines. Rand Fishkin of MOZ recounts, “We have lost rankings on many of tout most relevant keywords and while traffic has grown, we are missing many potential customers we used to capture.”
3) Get Comfortable with Your Customers
The SEO marketers in the survey revealed that when they strive to understand their customers, they see big wins. The good results are also in the wake of the delivery of audience-focused, high quality, and multimedia content in a way that is better than how anybody else is doing SEO marketing. Eli Schwartz of Survey Monkey put his future aspirations for SEO as “understanding user intent and building content that equals the intent behind the queries on search engines.”
4) Incorporate External Data
The introduction of RankBrain, Google’s arithmetic pegged on artificial intelligence has barely dented the ambition of the SEO marketers with Nicholas Chimonas of Page One Power saying, “Do not trust the Google hype, and test things yourself.”
Google which is the largest search engine used in the world is introducing algorithms that use machine thinking to predict and give back the sites that have the most relevance to the keywords used by the user if the search engine. The SEO marketers’ survey included 65 individual SEO marketers.
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