Promotion Strategy: TOP-3 Best Strategies From Semalt Experts



Not only the position of the site in the search engine results depends on which promotion strategy you have chosen; but also it depends at the end on the sales and your profit. Moreover, you have no right to be wrong.

Before talking about the strategy, you need to understand the clear goal that we ultimately pursue while we are promoting a site.

What kind of goal could it be? For example, we want to increase the search traffic by 10,000 clicks in six months. But you need to understand that with such a setting, this may also be inappropriate traffic, therefore one of the prerequisites will be the preservation of the current conversion to the sales, that means  in fact, we plan to receive 200 more applications from the site, the  from organic (if the current conversion of this channel is 2%).

This may already be a correct and good goal. However, you need to understand whether this goal is real and whether it is comparable with the current state of the affairs in the search engines and the capabilities of the site itself. For more information on how to understand whether your goal is realistic, we invite you to visit Semalt's services.

Website promotion strategy

The website promotion strategy depends on many parameters.
  1. Site type - corporate site, online store, portal, content project, social network and others. Each resource solves its own problems; it is obvious that the strategy will differ depending on the type of site.
  2. Age of the site. The strategy of a young site and a site that has been promoted for a long time are fundamentally different.
  3. The topic of the resource also affects the strategy. For example, for the promotion of a website for the sale of the plastic windows, the behavioral factors have a great influence and the convenience of the site for the users is very important (the presence of a functional calculator, convenient presentation of the information, etc.).  And for the new portals - the speed of the content updates, the domain of the site plays an important role in the promotion of the hotel sites - there were cases when only the sites with a part of "hotel" in the domain name were in the top, etc.
  4. Geography of promotion. The strategy will change depending on the region of promotion - wider is the geography, fewer are the representations in the regions and more resources will be required for the promotion.
  5. From the existing base: the current content fullness, the basic optimization, the site quality against competitors, the current traffic, etc. All this also influences the formation of the strategy.
  6. From the tasks: the promotion strategy in Yandex will differ from the promotion strategy of Google and differ from the promotion strategy for both search engines. This is due to the peculiarities of the search engine itself.

The promotion strategies: 3 examples

To understand what a strategy might look like, let's look at three of the most common online store promotion strategies.

The site is new and has not been promoted yet

Sooner you connect to an SEO specialist when you are creating a website, less money will be wasted. That is why our website development team necessarily includes an SEO specialist, which is why we make the websites that are already ready for the promotion.

This gives us a huge advantage - we design the site structure immediately based on the semantic core, take into account the intricacies of the CMS and immediately set up the site management system for the SEO, write the necessary content in the right amount and take into account many more nuances.

With the strategy of promoting a young site, everything is more or less simple. The first results will not be earlier than six months' time. At the same time, you should not expect that in six months your site will have the same traffic as the most promoted site of the subject.

It is the best decision to build a strategy when we are promoting a young site on the principle, or ranging from simple to complex. First, we try to get to the top for the low-frequency queries, then we gradually reduce the "longtail queries" (queries consisting of 3-7 words) and reduce it to shorter (2-3 words) and more frequent ones.

A site that is no longer young, but has not yet been promoted

The strategy for promoting such sites will differ from the strategy for promoting a newly created resource. As a rule, the middle-aged sites have already its reputation on the network, the base link mass (even if there was no promotion as such), in this case you can already consider and try to promote more frequent requests.

Therefore, before setting the goals and formulating a strategy, it is important to conduct a basic SEO audit in order to understand what initial data and opportunities we have.

Website with bad promotion experience

The sites very often come to work and the promotion has already been engaged, but the result is not satisfied. Here, the stake is placed on the deep primary analytics before rushing into the battle; you need to understand what went wrong. And only after finding out the reason, you can form a strategy.

The strategy for the promotion of the middle-aged sites will largely depend on how well the content, the link profile and the technical optimization are worked out. And it makes no sense to give a specific example here, because for each site the promotion plan will be different. Therefore, instead of the specifics examples, we will help you to formulate a promotion strategy specifically for your resource.

Development of a promotion strategy

To make the article as useful as possible, let us add interactivity to it. Next, we will describe in detail each of the three points (links, optimization, content) that influence the most all of the formation of a promotion strategy, and you will choose what matches your site - and at the end of the article you will see a personal promotion strategy for your resource.. So, it's easier to just start with the content.

1. Content

Content is very important for the promotion, so let us start with it. There are 4 types of content for an experienced resource:
  • Non-unique content prevails
If the content is not unique, there will be a lot of problems. So be sure to check your site for duplicate, non-unique content. The duplicates can be inside the site (when the site contains the same information at different addresses) and the external duplicates (when the same information is found on several resources).

Most often the duplicates appear:

- Due to the peculiarities of the content management system (engine);
- Theft of content, there are a lot of cases when the texts are stolen and do not blush;
- Bad faith of a copywriter who made a bad rewriting of a text from someone else's site, and the site owner did not control it;
- Unknowingly (versions for print are created, the same text is placed in different sections, etc.).

Simplest check: The home page is the face of your entire site. Therefore, check the text posted on the main page. If the uniqueness is greater than or equal to 90%, then everything is fine. If it is below, so mark the item with a checkbox.

For a detailed content analysis for the duplicates, I recommend using the services offered by Semalt.
  • Poorly optimized
If the text on your site is over-optimized, then nothing good is expected either. There is such an indicator used by Semalt experts, which will tell you how optimized the text is.
  • Users dislike
All the previous points were about how well the text will be perceived by the search engines. But among the ranking factors, there are also the behavioral factors. Indeed, you need the content to be liked by the visitors.

Checking: the easiest and roughest way to figure out whether users like the site or not is to go to Yandex.Metrica (or Google analytics) and see the bounce rate.

If your site has had a bounce rate of more than 20% over the past 3 months, this is a wake-up call and an excuse to get busy with the content or revise your traffic acquisition channels.

2. Link profile

The links are as important to the promotion as the content.

Ideally, these are the heterogeneous links in the natural link profile:

- From different sources (from reviews, forums, social networks, other sites, etc.);
- Different types (text, there are anchor, commercial and no, non-anchor);
- Of different weights (from large and small resources), etc.
  • Spammed
The links with direct occurrence of the keyword are usually good at promoting a site, but these same links are the most dangerous, because for its large number, you can get the sanctions.

When the commercial anchors prevail (requests for which people are looking for the goods or services to purchase them), it is worth monitoring the reaction of the search engines.
  • Clean
It also happens that the site has been online for a long time, but no work has been done with the links, then you can see a clean link profile. This happens, but recently it is extremely rare.
  • Critical
The search engines easily figure out when the links are specially bought for the promotion to the TOP, and can impose the sanctions to the site for this.

If everything is in order with the anchors and the profile is not spammed, then it makes sense to pay attention to the dynamics of the appearance and the disappearance of the incoming links. The growth should be smooth. If the growth is not smooth, then something is wrong, and the search engines will take note of your site.

3. Technical optimization

There are several basic points by which you can understand how optimized the site is, and what to do with it next.

Site duplicates

First of all, it is worth checking if there is a redirect from a site with www to a site without www - this simple check will show if the basic site optimization has been done.

After that, we evaluate the semantic core:
  • The semantic core is correct, the site is tailored for it
It is pointless to promote your site without a list of the keywords. It is like trying to hang a painting in the dark.

The keywords should not only be correctly distributed throughout the site, but should also be correctly selected. At the end, it should generate traffic.

If your site is still beautiful (keywords are used in the Title, Description, Headers and in the text itself), then the site can be considered optimized.

The last point to check is the website loading speed.

Website loading speed

Nobody likes it when the sites take a long time to open. Therefore, it makes sense to check the website loading speed on various devices.

Semalt has a dedicated tool to test the loading speed of your site, simply select the page you wish to test.

Let us sum up

There can be many strategies for promoting the middle-aged sites; it all depends on how carefully you worked with the site before.

Almost in all the cases, we do an initial deep site audit: we identify all the shortcomings and gradually eliminate it for priority purposes. In order to not waste your money and get the site to the TOP as quickly as possible. We use only the white methods for the promotion.

If you have analyzed the site and marked the points as you read the article, then the individual recommendations will become available for you below.

If the analysis turned out to be difficult, then we recommend ordering an SEO audit, then our specialists will study your site much deeper and in more details and will certainly give the personal recommendations to improve it, according to the importance of the shortcomings.

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