If you are looking to try and improve your approach to SEO, there are many approaches you might want to take towards that. But one which is very often going to be important to consider is cost-effectiveness. After all, you are always going to be keen for your SEO to be as cost-effective as possible, whether you are thinking about on-page or off-page instances of this. And as it happens, there are quite a few very cost-effective methods that you should be aware of.
Here are some of the best of these. If you can make use of even just a few of them, you should find that it leads to a significant improvement in your site’s visibility and ranking on SERPs.
The New E In EEAT
You probably already know about Google’s old acronym EAT, which stood for Expertise, Authority and Trust. But did you know that since December in 2022, this has generally been seen as having gained a new letter, specifically a new E? That’s because Google now considers the Experience of the author of a piece of content when deciding on how high-quality that content might be.
What does this translate to in reality? It’s all about making sure that you genuinely have real-world experience about what you are talking about. If you can show that you have this about the topic you are writing on, that is going to help hugely with how that content you are crafting will rank.
This is definitely something you need to be aware of, and start incorporating into your SEO as best as you can. And of course, the thing about experience is that it can’t be faked – you either have it, or you don’t.
Parasite SEO
You may have heard about this one, as it has been doing the rounds lately and is gaining traction as a very effective means of doing off-page SEO. Parasite SEO is all about leveraging the power of higher domain websites, for the betterment of your own site. It works by placing your content on a website that has a high DA and hopefully a lot of healthy backlinks. You then effectively piggyback on top of that in order to get your own content to ride up the SERP lists.
As you can imagine, this is very cost-effective, which is part of why so many people are now making use of this particular strategy. Proper Parasite SEO technique can lead to a serious improvement in how you are ranking very quickly, so it’s definitely something that you may want to try out as soon as possible.
Of course, who you choose as your partner here is a really important part of the process, and something you will need to think carefully about for the best results.
Audience-Targeted Content
Traditionally, we think of good SEO as being traffic-targeted, but there is now a moving away from that and more focus on being audience-targeted, and this is something that we are seeing in good SEO in 2023 quite a lot. What does this mean, though, and how can you make sure you are doing it right?
Essentially it’s all about making sure that your content is what people actually want to see, rather than simply trying to game the system by going for traffic all the way. Essentially, that doesn’t work anymore, and you really need to think carefully about what the real people want. As you can see, this ties into the matter of experience that we outlined above, and it’s proving to be something of a trend in SEO at the moment, and unlikely to change soon.
More Author Authority
Similarly to that, you also could benefit from more of a focus on author authority, which again is becoming a lot more important at the moment. This means that there is a turning away from auto-generated content, and that is especially important right now with AI doing what it is doing so effectively. You are going to find that you need to actually turn into real human authorial authority more. That is what is actually going to work when it comes to getting those rankings you are hoping for.
To that end, there are a few things you can do to ensure that you are making this clear. That would include having author bios on your content, creating author pages specifically, and linking to creators’ social media channels. All of that will add to the sense of authority and trust, and it is really going to make a huge difference to how effective your SEO is on the whole. Be sure that you don’t overlook this essential part of the process.
Genuinely Helpful Content
One thing that has long been the case is that content needs to be helpful for the reader or audience seeing it. This is only getting more and more relevant as information becomes dispersed and people are keen to make sure that they are getting the real information they actually want and need. So you should certainly make sure that you are putting a heavy focus on genuinely helpful content, rather than simply trying to fill pages.
For some, that can be something of a change, but it is one that is going to be welcome by all, including the Google crawlers you are trying to keep happy. You should absolutely make sure that you are providing genuinely helpful content for real people, and backed up with experience and authority. That is the way to ensure that people actually engage with your content, and that it therefore rises the ranks all the more effectively.
SEO Automation
There is a lot of debate over the automation of SEO, especially as it relates to a close topic of the use of AI to improve SEO. But if you are looking for some cost-effective means of improving your SEO, there is no doubt that some level of automation may prove to be helpful here. As it turns out, there are a lot of ways to automate SEO that you might want to be aware of at least, though it is finally up to you how much of it you make use of and how much of it you leave alone for others.
So what are some of the main kinds of SEO automation that you might want to consider? First of all, you have keyword research tools that can automate a process that can otherwise take a very long time for a human to carry out, and actually these tools can often be quite powerful and effective. Then you have something like site auditing platforms, which can detect changes and issues on your site automatically and inform you of what changes you might need to make for better on-page SEO.
Those clearly have the potential to be helpful, as do the website grading tools that some less-experienced people can use to help them figure out what their website needs for better SEO. These are all worth thinking about, but it’s ultimately up to you whether you opt for them or not.
Conversational Queries
It’s always wise to keep aware of how people actually search for the things they are searching for. Of course, that is something that Google is constantly trying to keep on top of, and the more aware of these trends you are, the better that is for your strategy, meaning that you can remain as cost-effective as you would hope. In recent years in particular, Google has been working on figuring out how people are actually speaking when they look for things and try to find out information.
One thing that you need to consider in optimizing for this trend is the rise of voice search. You ideally need to find out how people are searching for your keywords and queries by voice, what actual questions they are asking, and how you can make sure that you are utilizing that in your own SEO. Not enough businesses are doing this yet, so if you can get on top of this you should be putting yourself way out in front. It’s a really useful thing that you might want to make use of, for sure, and a trend that is likely only going to keep on growing too.
Video Marketing
This is something that likewise seems unlikely to go away any time soon, and the better you can make use of it, the more likely it is that your SEO is going to shine through as an example of how it is done. Consider making use of and incorporating video marketing as best as you can in your website. You’ll find this makes it more shareable and that people are generally going to go back to the content more too, which can really help. And it can help with authority and experience, as we have been discussing.
If you can make use of that, it will make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your SEO.
