Tactics Online Businesses Use for SEO

SEO is an important part of any online business strategy. When your SEO is good, you rank higher in search engine results, which means your website gets more organic traffic, for free. Without search engine ranking, an online business would have to rely almost entirely on costly advertising campaigns.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the common SEO tactics that online businesses use.

Web scraping

Web scraping is a popular growth hacking strategy that helps you harvest important, useful data from the web. An ecommerce business could use dynamic data and web scraping to create a price tracking tool that monitors the prices of competitors, so you can adjust your own pricing in response to real-time demand.

Web scraping is also useful for SEO and keyword research, as you can easily figure out what sort of keyword phrases competitors are using, and how many times on their pages. Building a web scraper yourself requires a bit of programming knowledge, but you can check out some of the best tools on the market for web scraping platforms.

As a side note, web scraping is perfectly legal, though it does fall under a “grey” morality. This is because sending too many requests to a server can overload it, so many webmasters are against web scrapers. If you do use the technique, be mindful of your impact on the target website’s resources.

Quality-content blog writing

An important part of SEO is being recognized by Google as an “authority”, so many websites put out blog articles full of useful information relevant to their niche. However, the emphasis is really on quality and user-engagement.

Google doesn’t want to see spammy blog content that is badly written, and stuffed full of keywords. That sort of stuff will actually get your website penalized.

It’s important to think of interesting topics relevant to your industry that you can write about, the kind of stuff that readers will learn from and even share on social media. If the information is really useful, you might get all kinds of unexpected referral traffic.

As a personal example, I once wrote an article for a personal blog on the exact bitrates that streaming music services like Spotify and Youtube deliver, intended for an audiophile audience. After a few months, I noticed I was getting a big boost in traffic to my blog, and it was coming from various audiophile forums and social media groups where my article was being shared.

So when writing high-quality content for your blog, it’s important not to focus on writing for search engine robots, but for a human audience that will want to share your content.

Mobile design

Over 50% of all global internet traffic comes from mobile devices, which is why Google switched to “mobile first” search indexing. This means that Google prefers to crawl the mobile version of your website to score it for ranking.

Thus, many businesses have switched to a “mobile first” focus on design, ensuring that their mobile website is a priority during development. Mobile design differs from desktop web design in a few ways, so you may want to read up on some mobile design tips.

If you have great mobile design, Google will look more favourably on your website for ranking factors. In fact, you can have a wonderful desktop website design, but if your mobile design is poor, it will hurt your SEO efforts.

Negative SEO defenses

Negative SEO is a blackhat practice of sabotaging a competitor’s SEO, using strategies such as building a network of spammy blog content with backlinks to your website. Google will penalize websites for having too many backlinks from low-quality sources, so you can see how this is an effective blackhat strategy at killing a competitor’s SEO ranking.

Fortunately there are numerous ways to defend yourself against negative SEO attacks, which you can read about here.

Fabrizio VanMarcino
 

Fabrizio Van Marciano is a self-taught web designer, front-end web developer, and content creator. He is the founder of FVM.