Sustainable SEO - Long-term Organic Growth

Organic traffic from search engines can be the gift that keeps on giving. Sure there's some upfront effort involved, but get it right and you'll get a steady stream of audience and qualified leads that you would be paying through the nose for otherwise. Get it wrong, though, and all the effort of setting up and managing a site and creating content can go to waste. 

There have always been "hacks" or tricks to help you gain an audience from Google. Whether it’s dodgy link-building practices or, more recently, spamming out low-quality AI-generated content, there have always been short-term SEO opportunities that can drive a significant audience. However, these tactics come at the expense of long-term success, leading to potential penalties and a loss of credibility.

That’s not how we work.

Achieving long-term SEO success is a lot like exercise. You need to keep doing the right things consistently and not do the shady things you might see competitors winning with right now. Give it six months or a year, and Google will catch up and penalise you. I’ve helped dozens of sites recover from manual and algorithmic penalties, and sometimes, I’ve seen big sites damaged so severely by doing the wrong things to achive short-term objectives that they never recover.

That’s why at Platia Digital, we have a simple three-point plan to help site owners improve their SEO and increase their organic audiences. We do this following consultation and often a deeper strategy session to ensure all stakeholders are aligned on the business priorities so we can focus the plan on what matters to you.

Technical and Content SEO Audit

The first step is crucial and helps us understand a site's health and what we can do to improve it. An audit uncovers all the skeletons in a site’s closet and helps us create a plan focusing on the most significant improvements and fixes. As holistic SEOs and content experts, we do more than look at technical issues; we also look at the quality of the content, the site's E-E-A-T credentials, performance and UX and current topic area strengths and weaknesses. We’ve already established that this is a long-term strategy, but quick wins that still conform to best practices are often possible. This is where we’ll identify them.

Train Teams on SEO

The technical and content audit will highlight areas of opportunity. Often, these will require training for nascent content teams to understand SEO fundamentals or more experienced digital editors to gain advanced SEO knowledge that they can implement daily. It will also highlight where technical fixes are required and often gaps in development SEO expertise.

Track and Analyse SEO Performance

It’s crucial to track site performance and critical keywords to understand what’s working and what’s not. We use keyword-tracking software, analytics dashboards, and other tools to understand what’s working over time and what isn’t. We can also track website health so development changes that negatively impact a site don’t go unnoticed.

There are many different ways to get fit, such as exercising. For some, it's jogging; for others, lifting weights or yoga. Similarly, every site has different requirements, and something that works on one might have little or no impact on another. There are many variables to consider, so our audits are different. We carefully analyse where a site has authority and where it wants to go and advise based on that knowledge. We conduct measurable, low-effort tests that help guide the process.

If you’re looking for short-term SEO hacks, plenty of people on social media will be happy to oblige and likely damage your site’s long-term SEO reputation. Get in touch if you’re looking for a sustainable SEO model that works for your business.

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