Is Holistic SEO Your Best Approach?

The world of search engine optimization (SEO) has changed drastically over the last decade. Tactics that used to land you on the first page of Google are no longer relevant, and can even put you in some really hot water.

In the good old days, the two main priorities in getting a website ranked were your keywords and link-building. Marketers and web masters would invest all their efforts into keyword stuffing and exhausting every possible incoming link they could find. Today, both of these strategies are minimal in effect, even when done properly. If done improperly, they can fall under Google's "black hat" technique list and get you in trouble -- or worse, banned from the search engines. It happens.

In order to be successful in today's world of optimization, you really need to adopt a holistic approach to SEO. This means that you're planning and strategizing from the onset of any campaign or event, to ensure all components support one another.

Let's bring this into a real-world example for demonstrative purposes; these suggestions and methods will be easily adopted into any industry.

Let's say you're a small and growing construction company. Year over year, your business grows and you've reached the point where you are ready to open up a retail store. You will be renting out heavy equipment and selling construction supplies to other contractors.

It's absolutely critical to your business that anyone searching on Google for heavy equipment rental or construction supplies (in your area) lands on your website. You've got a guy who manages SEO for your site, and it ranks well for your other important keywords.

Your grand opening is just a few months down the road -- what else could you be doing to support your SEO efforts?

- You've done keyword research on Google, to learn what terms consumers are using when searching for your services and products. You've used these words as the foundation for your blog posts and titles, as well as the content and headlines on your new dedicated web page.
- You design that new page I just mentioned on your website, that's dedicated to your new location. The content for this page is based around your keyword research.
- You create and release a blog post about your new location, that's also based around the keywords from your prior research.
- You share that blog post on your social media outlets.
- You've prominently displayed share and email buttons on your blog post, and your new web page, to ensure it's easy for people to spread the word.
- You've already been focusing on growing your social media accounts, so you've got a great, engaged audience that will see this post and hopefully share it for their friends and followers to see.
- You've got 65 employees -- use them. You ask each one of them to share your post on their personal social media accounts, and even create a catchy hashtag for your big opening.

So as you can see, this is a very basic and low-cost approach that would fall outside the traditional idea of what SEO is all about. But when you approach your optimization plan with a holistic, comprehensive mindset, your results are going to be significantly better. If you're already investing in SEO, take a step back to reconsider how you could be improving your results when you incorporate some of the ideas from above.