10 Questions to Rethink Your SEO Strategy

Is SEO Dead? The question comes up every year as myriad factors, such as  the emergence of AI, challenge traditional notions about how people search. In fact, SEO is as relevant as ever if your target audience uses search to find, evaluate, and purchase your product or service – which means SEO is relevant for anyone online. But your strategy might be dated.

SEO laggards continue to focus on search engines rather than users, rely on link building without a content strategy, over-optimize for specific keywords, obsess over rankings, and prioritize search engine traffic above all else. Want to be a leader instead of a laggard? Ask yourself the following 10 questions as you evaluate your SEO strategy:

1: Do You Use Content Marketing to Provide Value, or Are You Simply Trying to Grow Your Backlink Profile?

Yep, backlinks are still relevant. However, to make an impact on performance with off-page tactics, you need a strong content strategy. Gone are the days of running link campaigns to increase the authority of unhelpful content. The same goes for guest posting en masse.

Search engines are always improving their natural language processing (NPL) to best answer a searcher’s query. Today, their technology can process the context of phrases that they were unable to process in the past. Since BERT, Google can now understand the terms used before and after search queries to decipher what results fit the intent of the user.

Read the Subtext Here . . .

If Google can better understand the context of content and use it in its ranking algorithm, Google can equally understand if backlinks are relevant and qualitative. This requires brands to lead with content that is helpful and share-worthy.

What does share-worthy mean? Well, ask this question: “Would I want to share this with others?” If you answered yes, there is an opportunity to naturally gain backlinks. A manual backlink campaign should still be leveraged, but the campaign should use only helpful content that targets customers rather than product or service-level pages.

Save guest posting for providing value to micro-communities where your target customer may be. Then leverage PR for high-value publication placements to increase awareness and brand authority – which will help all marketing channels.

Ensure your PR team understands best-practice off-page SEO so that they can include hyperlinks with rich anchor text in their content, when possible.

2: Do You Take a People-First or a Crawler-First Approach?

Google said it best in its Helpful Content Update that went live in August 2022: “focus on people-first content.” The purpose of the Helpful Content Update is to https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update reward sites whose intentions are to better serve their user, rather than to create pages solely to rank for various search queries.

This doesn’t mean SEO best practices are discounted. SEO optimization is still incredibly important to maximize SERP visibility. However, apply these optimizations to people-first content.

Are you unsure if your brand is taking a people-first approach? Google provides a self-assessment to help you decide. Or, simply use the “Who, How, and Why” model Google recommends to assess your content. Ask yourself:

• Who created the content?
• How was the content created?
• Why was the content created?

“Who” and “how” increase the transparency and trust with the reader by giving context as to who is giving the information, and how the knowledge is being collected or shared.

For example, if you are using experts in the field, say so. If you are using AI to assist in your content creation, say so. If you conducted a survey of 5,000 marketers, explain how the survey was conducted.

“Why” is the utmost important question, though. The answer to “why” should always be to help your target audience in some fashion. If the only reason is to attract more search traffic or manipulate SERPs, you aren’t creating people-first content.

3: Is Your Keyword Research and Optimization Strategy Considering Topical Relevancy?

Your SEO strategy should place priority on a topic-focused approach to SEO, as it can help to close any gaps in your content and increase engagement from semantic terms.

Taking a topic approach to SEO can be much more effective than attempting to optimize separate pages for various semantic terms. If your team is focusing solely on seed keywords during their research process, doing so can lead you down a path of crawler-first content, rather than focusing on the needs of users who may be searching for information throughout a journey.

To illustrate, let’s say you're Office Depot. Rather than solely targeting keywords that relate to your products, you should consider all topics related to “home office.”

By doing so, you may discover that “work from home” is a popular subtopic with various user queries interested in such as work from home productivity, necessary equipment, pros and cons, jobs that allow you to work from home, and much more.

Moreover, you may find that even though these questions are being asked by your target customers, Office Depot doesn’t appear in the top 10 for “home office” or “work from home” topics.

If your brand doesn’t have the expertise to discuss sub-topics like “work from home,” partner with brands, experts or influencers who do!

4: What Is Your Primary KPI – Keyword Position or Click-Through Rate?

Keyword position in the SERP is still important, yet it’s crucial not to overlook the role of SEO in increasing click-through rate.

In some cases, the SERP position may be beyond our control. Search engines often display aggregators, retailers, or large publications at the top of the organic listings on Page One.

To ensure you are set up for success in terms of click-through rate, ask yourself the following questions:

• Have you optimized your website for as many visual elements of Google Search as possible?
• Are you eligible for as many rich results as possible?
• Do you have a review strategy in place?
• Are you using attractive images on the page? Are they optimized to show as a card or within multi-search?
• Are you using metadata to capture attention and highlight the unique selling points of navigating to your site versus an aggregator, retailer, or publication?

5: Are Your Content, SEO, and UX Teams Working Collaboratively?

By now, most brands recognize the importance of having an internal team or agency dedicated to optimizing their website for best practice SEO. However, a common and significant gap often arises in the collaboration between SEO, content, development, and user experience (UX) teams.

Industry leaders recognize the need for improving business operations to align everyone towards a common goal, thereby improving performance across various tactics.

For instance, page speed is not only a direct ranking factor for search engines, but also a crucial element of UX. Regardless of how valuable the content may be, people will find it useless if they encounter difficulties accessing or engaging with it.

This, in turn, can affect important business metrics like revenue due to flat or declining leads or transactions.

According to a survey by Unbounce, 75 percent of users will abandon a page if it doesn’t load in under 4 seconds, and only 11.5 percent will wait more than 13 seconds. However, despite this, only 3 percent of marketers prioritize page speed improvements. Why is this the case?

Page speed or Core Web Vital optimization is often viewed as an SEO effort that requires development and/or UX resources. If these teams don't work together, their roadmap may not overlap with critical business tasks, ultimately leading to inaction.

Furthermore, SEO visitors must take action on your website for the traffic to be valuable. Ensuring that every visitor has a clear call-to-action (CTA) on their journey will guarantee that your SEO efforts are generating value.

6: Does Your SEO Strategy Assess User and SERP Intent?

SEJ explained it best:

Old Way:

“Research top-ranked sites to extract keywords and write content with those keywords.”

New Way:

“Research top-ranked sites to understand the latent question being asked and then provide a better answer.”

Search habits change daily.People used to once search for “basketball” with the intent of purchasing sporting goods. This was when there wasn’t an ability to watch live basketball, keep up with basketball news, or learn about the sport.

With the availability of live streaming, sports betting, fantasy leagues, and more, the SERP for “basketball” has shifted to yield informational results.

You’ll now find top news stories, March Madness brackets, frequently asked NBA or NCAA questions, or video recaps of recorded games.

By using a combination of AI and manual analysis of SERPs, you can identify the type of content that is most valuable to the searcher and determine their intent. This involves determining whether the searcher is seeking a video, a downloadable resource, or an infographic that better meets their requirements.

By asking such questions, it’s possible to choose an appropriate content type.

SEMRush uses four categories for distinguishing search intent apart from each other. Assigning these categories can assist in shaping content strategy.

But don’t stop at these four categories, read my article on intent-driven marketing to better discern intent.

In addition to informing SEO and content strategy, understanding intent and which content is most useful can better inform UX, email, or social strategy. For instance, if YouTube results are prominent in the SERP, this indicates social teams should consider incorporating the topic into their organic content calendar or an ad campaign on video-driven platforms.

7: Do You Have a Mobile-First Mindset?

Google has prioritized mobile indexing of content for some time now, yet similar to page speed, it often gets overlooked.

What is mobile-first indexing anyways? Google crawls web pages using smartphone agents to interpret their content and determine their ranking. Considering that most users favor mobile devices, it is imperative to enable a mobile-first strategy for content and landing page experience as well.

A mobile-first experience with UX and SEO teams on board:

• Uses a responsive design.
• Is easy to interact with.
• Has a primary call-to-action (CTA).
• Has content consistent with the desktop experience.
  • Meta tags
  • Copy
  • DOM
  • Layout
  • Structured data
  • Alt text
• Allows Google to see lazy-loaded content.
• Is acceptable by the Better Ads Standards.
• Passes Core Web Vitals.
• Passes Accessibility standards.

8: Are You Optimizing for New Search Tactics, Outside of Search Engines?

You can’t have SEO without search engines, but you can consider broadening your scope of what you consider “SEO.”  Statista reported  45% of US Shoppers started their product search on Amazon in 2022.

eMarketer reported 56% of US adults started their search on Amazon as of February 2023, and Gen Z audiences are continuing to increase social search when looking for products.

In the past, Google was the go-to destination for individuals seeking products, services, or solutions. However, as the digital landscape has evolved, so, too, have consumer preferences.  Nowadays, brand and product discovery are not limited to Google alone. Focusing only on improving visibility in SERPs can result in significant gaps in your overall search strategy.

Retailers, social media platforms, and aggregators are among the places where consumers search for products and services. This offers opportunities to enhance discoverability by including:

• Product search on Amazon.
• Product search on Instagram or TikTok.
• Solution search on YouTube.
• Service search on NextDoor, Angie’s List, Yelp, etc.
• Home search on Zillow, RedFin, etc.
• Job search on Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.

Each of the listed tactics have unique best practices or standards to consider optimizing for maximum visibility. Overlooking any of these platforms or applying a one-size-fits-all approach could limit your brand's growth potential.

Moreover, by optimizing on various platforms, you equally increase the avenues your brand can be accessed within a search engine.

(Read SEMRush’s guide to Social SEO)

Case in point: if a skincare brand wanted to begin selling products on Amazon. Optimizing their product detail pages to reflect best practices should include:

• Increasing the results in the SERP to make the brand more visible.
• Giving the searcher more avenues to convert.

9: Is Your SEO Strategy Addressing All Stages of the User Journey?

The user journey has become more intricate. In question #8 we discussed new search channels for the discovery stage, but marketers also need to think about the consideration and decision phases of the user journey and how those search channels are changing.

Searchers now rely on various sources to help them make a final decision on a product or service. Consequently, your SEO strategy must consider review generation, affiliate marketing, and content.

Review generation

Is there social proof readily available for potential clients? Are your reviews on platforms that your target audience frequents?

Affiliate marketing

Is your brand listed on top or best-of lists? Are you being recommended by influencers or industry leaders?

Without these tactics, your ability to continue to increase market share might be limited. The key to increasing market share is not only to focus on increasing the visibility of your owned digital properties such as your website, GBP, app, etc., but also increasing coverage of your brand and product/services across the SERP. This is especially relevant for large companies and brands who’ve dominated their industry in the past, it becomes increasingly more difficult to identify optimization strategies that will yield growth. 

10: Are You Harnessing the Power of AI?

Generative AI, (e.g.,ChatGPT) is a category of AI that can create new content. But many companies are still failing to use the basic capabilities of AI to improve operations, insights, and performance.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine if you’re taking an AI-approach to SEO:

• Are you using AI-powered tools to assess the readability of your content?
• Do you leverage AI to conduct competitive analysis and identify content gaps relative to your competitors?
• Are you using AI to understand search intent and discover trending topics related to your business?
• Do you use AI to reduce the time it takes to coordinate between content and SEO teams?
• Are you using AI to conduct A/B testing of metadata for click-through rates?
• Are you leveraging AI to scale technical optimization?

If not, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities, both operationally and performance-wise.

On a related note, make sure you read our blog post on Google’s AI-powered Generative Search Experience.

Contact IDX

SEO is still impactful in more ways than ever before, but it needs to evolve to meet the changing needs of search engines and users. Need help prioritizing what will make the biggest splash, first? We can help. Learn more about our top-notch SEO services and contact us today!