Top 5 SEO Strategies To Optimize Reach For Digital Publishers

Understanding an SEO strategy

An SEO strategy or approach is made by publishers with the intention to reach maximum audience engagement. This navigates the content creation process while ensuring that the content is “search engine friendly.” Building an SEO strategy refers to planning and then implementing steps that aim to improve organic traffic through search engine rankings.

Learn from your competition

If you’re in the digital publishing industry, chances are you’ve curated a list of competitors, some more relevant than others. This is a healthy exercise that can help you grow while always reevaluating your focus points. It’s an easy way to learn, observe and strategize.

For SEO, look into your competitors' content. Look into what keywords they’re working on, what are their most popular blogs, how they approach content, what are the various channels used, etc.

The more you know of different SEO strategies that are gaining positive results, the more value you can add to your own strategy. You can learn where their organic traffic comes from and what’s the agent that drives them. You can also compare data to get a more quantifiable idea about where you stand.

Authority Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most effective ways to gain traction and rank higher on google.

According to Google’s guidelines - The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

The most effective way to create credible backlinks is by making use of digital PR. You can start by finding journalists who work in your niche and submit PRs that are promotional but also interactive with their audience. Having a linkable asset always sells better than a simple promotion. You can gain more traffic to your website while your content ranks higher on search engines. Another great tactic is to work with a SaaS link building agency so that they will build your authority backlinks more professionally.

Be smart with “People also ask for”

One of these features that SEOs need to utilize is ‘People Also Ask’ (PAA). this is:

• They can help you rank twice

• They can act as query refinements for questions google may not have the answer to.

• You can gather content that is specifically meant to answer PAA results. This helps direct readers onto your website and makes you a credible source on google’s search engine.

Supportive content is always good

While dealing with content, rather than going for a 10,000-word article, it’s often preferred to have smaller but in-depth articles that link back to pillar content. This ensures that content comes across effectively and interested readers can easily move from one page to the other without it being chaotic.

In order to show that you are a subject expert you will have to stand a chance in ranking at the top of SERPs for your target keywords and this means using your supportive content effectively.

While supportive content cannot help you gain traction on its own, with the right promotion it can help you with retention. It can help your main pages rank high and attract traffic through diverse channels.

Master your Core Web Vitals

We have dedicated content on Core Web Vitals (Also read)

To put it simply, Google Web core vitals look into the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of websites. The better the user experience on your website, the higher it ranks. These are the metrics measured -

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Duration for the primary content of a page to load.

• First Input Delay (FID) - The duration for the page to become interactive.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - The amount of shift in the layout of the visual contents of the page.

Google started focusing on page speed and performance predominantly in 2021. This is when publishers tracked the core web vitals in order to rank high on the search engine.

Safe browsing, AMP speed, loading time, and HTTPS were all brought to the forefront of prioritization. A healthy website is a popular website - it’s as simple as that!