What Is the Best SEO Strategy? The 2020 Answer

Why do most SEO agencies miss the point?

Because they run a fixed recipe of on-site checks and link building without understanding that SEO is really about the cost per acquisition of a customer.

One of my clients asked me recently what the best SEO tactic currently out there is, and it turns out it is not really something most SEO agencies offer or advise, because most SEO companies are running a recipe: on-site checks, meta descriptions, optimising pages, building some links, a bit of social, writing some blogs. That is all well and good, but most SEO agencies are not marketing businesses, and they do not fundamentally understand that it comes back to the cost per acquisition of a customer, which in turn comes back to the quality of the traffic you are driving to your page. If that quality of traffic goes up, your conversion goes up, and Google gets great signals that people are landing on your page, browsing, enquiring, looking at other content, maybe going on to your social pages, and that pushes your content up.

Should you run paid alongside your SEO strategy?

Yes: if you are on page two of Google and you send more traffic that sticks, engages and takes action, Google will promote that page, probably onto page one.

Most SEO agencies do not recommend a paid strategy because it feels counterintuitive to them, they will say they need traffic and that it will come through rankings. But I can say categorically that sending genuinely engaged traffic to a page that is already ranking on page two will move it up, typically towards page one. Most SEO agencies will not talk about paid, purely because it is not what they do and not their expertise.

What is the single best SEO tip right now?

Video, and specifically video that answers the questions your potential clients are actually asking.

SEO is now far more about brand, and the best tip you will get at the moment is to make videos, and to make video that answers people's questions. Go onto Google, ask a question around the topic your business solves for clients, and Google will suggest a whole list of other related topics and questions. Choose which of those you turn into videos, and if you code those videos correctly, they will come to the top of search, and quickly, while also answering your potential clients' actual questions. When someone watches a video that answers their question, they start to see you as the authority, and it does not need to cost a fortune, this video was literally made on a phone.

How do you decide what to make, and does paid promotion actually help a video rank?

Build videos around the questions and intent you find on Google, and use paid promotion to get them watched, because views and engagement are what push a video to rank.

Answer people's questions around your topic almost like a video blog, and people will see you as the authority, then come to you to buy, enquire, or ask further questions, as a demonstration of your expertise and your product. If you are telling yourself it is difficult to build videos, ask yourself whether your competitor is going to do this strategy instead, and if they do, whether they will out rank you quickly. We work on YouTube a lot, taking people's content and promoting it, and views typically cost about a penny, so for a thousand pounds you are talking about a hundred thousand views. If a hundred thousand people see a product promoted well, and the content is good and shows you are a reputable, expert business, people will click through to your site, and that video will then rank because it is getting views and engagement.

Typically an SEO company does not understand the full marketing mix and will not recommend tactics like video, because they worry a client might find something better than SEO and move their budget across. So be careful, and deal with somebody who offers a full, rounded, end-to-end marketing strategy rather than just a nice shiny report showing where your keywords ranked that month.