When it comes to long-term SEO strategies, there are so many tactics to consider. There are dozens of powerful marketing strategies to consider, and each comes with its own set of investments, risks, and rewards.
With so many options, many brands and marketers are left to ask: What are the best tactics for SEO? And even more, what are the strategies that will produce the best long-term results?
Let’s drill down into our list of long-term SEO tactics to find the strategies that will work best for your brand and produce results for years to come.
Guest Posting
Because the number of links pointing to your website substantially impacts your SEO rankings (the more high-quality links you have, the better), link building is one of the best SEO tactics. An effective link building strategy involves providing guest post content and infographics to other websites.
Engage in guest blogging outreach and provide content to sites that share your audience to build links that will provide long-term SEO value.
Publishing High-Quality Content
As far as promotional tactics examples go, creating content on other sites is a good long-term SEO strategy. But it’s also very important to prioritize creating content on your own site. Search engines give higher rankings to sites that have a deep library of valuable, high-quality content. They also prefer sites that have fresh content.
So one of the best long-term marketing tactics is regularly publishing content on your site. Develop an editorial calendar and create a plan to consistently publish new evergreen content if you want to create long-term value for your website.
Performing Keyword Research
To achieve long-term SEO results, you must have a strong web foundation built on targeting terms related to your business, industry, and offerings. If you don’t target and rank for the right terms, your audience won’t be able to find you. So one of the most important SEO tactics is keyword research.
You must research the phrases and terms that your audience uses, and find the best keywords that will help you connect with your target customers.
Optimizing for Keywords (and LSI Keywords)
It’s not enough to just know your keywords. You must use them in the right way to fully develop long-term SEO value. The best tactics include assigning one keyword to each page on your website and optimizing that page using on-site SEO best practices. That way you always publish SEO friendly posts and page content.
To make this strategy even more effective, you can find related keywords and assign two to three related keywords or LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing keywords) to each post to send even more ranking signals to search engines.
Creating Internal Links
While external links that point to your site provide long-term SEO value, so do links on your site. When you include internal links (links on your website that point to other pages on your website), you send signals to search engines that tell them how to understand, prioritize, and rank the pages on your site.
As you create content for your website, link to other pages on your site within your content. Use anchor text that uses the page’s target keywords or phrases that explain what the page is about.
Setting Up Local SEO and Directory Profiles
Another one of the best SEO tactics creates even more links to your site to improve your SEO. Local SEO practices and building profiles on business directories can build online authority for your brand and make a bigger digital footprint for your website.
Create profiles for your business (and include a link to your website) on major directory sites such as Google My Business, Yelp, Angie’s List, Yellow Pages, and other listing resources associated with your industry.
Optimizing for Technical SEO
The last section in our list of best long-term SEO tactics has multiple action items. Unlike many of the other items in this roundup, these strategies don’t need to be executed as ongoing. They are items that you can set up once and then manage with little to no maintenance.
- Create a Google Webmasters account and submit your site index.
- Optimize your website, so it loads quickly.
- Design every page on your website, so it’s responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Utilize organized and natural site architecture.
- Add an SSL certificate to your site.
- Audit inbound links on your site and fix any broken links.
By following technical SEO best practices, you create a solid foundation for your website that can provide long-term value. All of your other marketing tactics on top of this will ensure that your site continues to rank higher and show up more frequently in search results.
7 long-term SEO strategies for lasting impact on your brand
Creating Long-Term SEO Results
While there are dozens of strategies that can help you achieve long-term SEO results, these tactics will produce the best and longest lasting impact for your business or brand. While you can’t focus only on these strategies (you still need to dedicate resources to the dozens of other SEO strategies), these are the ones to focus most of your energy on.
