One of the best ways to do SEO and be successful at it is to learn all about marketing in general and even branch out beyond digital marketing. When you do this, you begin to see a pattern about how brands are built both online and offline. This will give you some brand new ideas that you could make part of your overall SEO strategy. Being able to generate traffic without ever needing Google should be your end goal.

Companies have been making sales without search engines or even the internet for hundreds of years, but due to the rise of technology, most people have simply forgotten all about those days because it seems like the internet has been a part of our lives for a lot longer than it actually has. Advertising and branding were critical components that gave rise to companies like Microsoft, Apple and Coca-Cola. These brands mastered the art of advertising and used it to build a brand.

Getting traffic to your website can seem like a tricky task since most recommend doing PPC or SEO at the start of your website launch. These channels tend to be the first ones to be recommended because they are the most established and can be set up very quickly. Building a strong traffic base normally takes time and money, so don’t be shocked if you need to pay some money to advertise your brand-new website.

Getting just any old traffic is a waste of time; the right type of traffic is consumers who are within your demographic that may be interested in purchasing your products or services down the line, but you also want to leverage that traffic to help promote your website. This is pretty easy to do these days thanks to social media and the ability to go viral very quickly.

One way to get traffic quickly is to tap into existing traffic pools from sites and platforms that already have an established audience. Uploading a YouTube video and building a channel is a very simple but effective way of getting some traffic directed to your website quickly. You can pick a simple strategy to do this, such as putting your website in the video description, but one of the most effective ways is to upload a video without the ending.

This strategy is almost the same idea as a movie trailer; if you watch the trailer, you are more invested in watching the movie, so if you watch a 10-minute video but the ending is missing, then you are more likely to want to watch the rest, so having the video suddenly stop and then having the screen say, “To view the rest of the video, go to domain.com” is a great way to promote your website and get some targeted traffic.

Another way to get traffic is to start networking with other sites within the industry. If they are a competitor of yours who sells the same things, then perhaps this strategy won’t work, but if you can find and target some bloggers within your market or another market that is similar to yours but not direct competition, then you may find that they are willing to promote you by featuring you on their website or plugging you on their social media. To do this, you need to network with them, establish a relationship with them first and ensure you can bring some value to their website.

Many business owners will be very sceptical at first if you are new to the industry and don’t have an established website or brand name, so the best thing to do is get to know them personally and talk with them back and forth before you ever ask for any promotion. You never know what can happen just by having a friend in the industry; establishing a network with similar traffic can be used to boost traffic to your brand-new site quickly and is normally a very underrated strategy.

Another tactic that doesn’t get anywhere near the coverage that it should is traditional advertising. Billboards are a great way to get brand exposure, and prices are normally pretty reasonable since most brands just go online these days, so you can get advertising cheaper due to less demand. Having this kind of mainstream exposure for your brand name is a great way to get offline traffic to your website. People forget that brands once used this as a way to get people to visit their stores or buy their products. This kind of advertising still works and may be even more effective and cheaper these days.

Social media marketing is also quite untapped; there are so many companies that fail to use social media correctly. They tend to put up a page but not really understand how to implement the right strategy that will help spread the word about their brand and business. The ultimate goal should always be to get your brand name to as many eyeballs as possible. This can be done if you use the right strategy, and with social media, it is often free to start a page and get the word out.

Social media sites like Facebook, X and Instagram are a great way to build a following and keep people up to date with the latest offers in your business. Building a following may take time, but you can always speed it up by using paid ads to hit scale quickly. Most social networks offer this option now, but if money is tight, then why not run a competition or ask people to share your business in exchange for something?

Social media is like word-of-mouth marketing for the modern age, but now instead of a customer telling 10 people, they have access to thousands at their fingertips. It can be a really great way to get traffic and is almost instant when it comes to hitting the share button. Getting traffic quickly is a great benefit for most business owners who don’t want to sit around and wait months for SEO efforts to finally take hold.

Viral marketing is one of the best ways to really get a monstrous amount of traffic without needing to wait on SEO to deliver a result. Viral marketing is very tricky, as some things just don’t work or happen more organically than you would think, but the basics of a story are always the same and can be used as an effective marketing strategy.

Learning to tell and craft good stories is perhaps one of the most overlooked skills when it comes to marketing and advertising in general; this requires a whole different skillset, and many traditional companies simply don’t understand how to craft a good narrative and how to get people talking about an advertising campaign.

Within local towns you will have no doubt heard about special characters that live locally; everyone has some kind of story about a local to tell that is sometimes unbelievable. The stories get edited as the years go by, but the point is that it goes viral and it is retold by many people.

When you think about traditional ways of going viral, you will see some common elements. You should take these and boil them down to the core, asking yourself questions such as, “Why are people interested in this topic?” “Why is this newsworthy?” “Who shared this initially?” “Did someone famous share this to make it viral?”

You need to ask yourself as many questions as possible and trace the original source. Finding out what these stories have in common is a great way to put together a “template” for viral marketing which increases the probability of it going viral, but of course it doesn’t make it a guarantee. Some stories just don’t work as well as others, so even if you have some successful campaigns, then you can’t always make it happen.

One of the best ways to get traffic is to tap into current events. Many companies latch onto breaking news items and create campaigns around them because the competition is low but the attention is high. This is a great way for digital marketing agencies to get some attention for themselves or their clients. Keep watching for trending topics or news items and get in early with an interesting story or spin.

Many digital companies struggle to adapt to countless SEO changes, but by studying the past marketing channels, we can see some common themes that could be reused in SEO terms. The ability to tell a good story will always come in handy when it comes to creating content or even sending outreach emails. Be creative and borrow elements from other outlets you wouldn’t normally look at. Go outside your industry to get new ideas, and think about how you could spin and apply them to benefit your client or your own business.

Creative industries have gone into decline due to lack of innovation and the ability to remember what worked in the past. Ultimately, the same psychological triggers and strategies can be used to gain attention; while the market and trends will shift, that doesn’t mean that human beings don’t still respond to a good story, billboard ad or even a banner ad. Remember, just because it’s old-fashioned doesn’t mean it won’t work.

Many in the SEO industry will have faced the dreaded question from clients at some point: your pitch is completed, things have gone well, you talk about your strategy and then talk about how much money it will cost, but the client has a question: how long will this take?

One of the first things you must make the client understand is that the value generation of SEO is a long-term payoff. If the client needs results within a few months, then they simply don’t yet understand the value you are bringing to the table. You should attempt to show your expertise by showing some previous case studies of businesses that you have helped and show the client how, over the long term, SEO is a great investment.

Investment should be a keyword that you hammer home time and time again; you should make them remember that SEO, when done right and in the long term, can provide a positive ROI which can grow a business. On average, you can see positive results from SEO within the first 3–6 months, so if the client needs something quickly, then they should try the PPC channel instead, as this can bring clicks and potential sales on the same day.

SEO is a long-term strategy that helps to boost your brand and also your direct sales by increasing your search engine visibility by getting you listed higher on Google and other search engines. Understanding that SEO takes a long time to bear fruit should be an essential part of your sales pitch. It’s vital that clients are on board with sticking around for as long as possible so they get to see the true ROI that only a great SEO process can provide.

SEO is now one of the oldest digital marketing channels, which makes it very trusted and established with big brand names and in the advertising industry in general. Business owners may have a rough idea of what SEO is but not how to do it or how long it takes to research, study and analyse the competition. Clients may even try to do SEO themselves before they give up after researching how complex it is.

Our job is to ensure the client understands that this is a full-time job and a long-term process that evolves over time; there is no such thing as an SEO model that lasts forever. Google updates ensure that their search algorithm is forever updating as more data is uncovered and they put more priority on certain metrics over others. One of the biggest things that clients need to realise is just how many years you have invested to become great at SEO.

While SEO may take a long time, you can boost the trust the client has in you by delivering something quickly. Building trust during your sales pitch is critical and is required. Normally the first 3 months are when buyer’s remorse will be felt the strongest, so being in touch with the client during this window is critical. You must show them you are active and working on solving the problem. Send them a spreadsheet with all the edits you have made on page and any progress you have made in regard to getting links from outreach or press releases.

There are many factors that influence how quickly the SEO process will yield some results. The way that the Google algorithm works is by taking a look at an estimated 200 ranking factors; some of these factors can be manipulated to give you a faster ranking boost.

One of the biggest factors for how fast a site will rank is the age of the website; new websites will often take the full 6 months to really start gaining any trust with Google. This is a normal part of the process which helps Google to take enough time to ensure you are a legitimate business with a plan for the future and not a fly-by-night operation that can rank quickly, take orders and money and then close down. Google knows that this is terrible for their brand name because consumers end up getting ripped off and it reflects badly on their recommendations from organic search results.

Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the size of the website; if the client has a few hundred pages, then it won’t take long to make the changes that will boost rankings, but if we talk about hundreds of thousands of product pages, then obviously this will be a very slow turnaround. While it may take 6 months to see the full results of SEO, I have seen many ranking improvements from editing on-page metrics; sometimes even manually submitting non-indexed URLs can cause a huge surge in both rankings and traffic.

Perhaps the biggest factor in the length of time taken to rank a website with Google is the backlink profile. If a site is brand new, then you usually see a few backlinks from the likes of the web design company that built the site, local press releases and maybe a few citations, but normally you tend to find under 50 backlinks for a fresh website.

Backlinks are one of the biggest factors to gaining both trust and ranking with Google, so you really need to work on increasing this metric, but not just any backlink will do; some of them are best avoided, and as discussed, certain links may take months to acquire, as you want to do quality outreach, which takes a lot of site analysis and then producing good content for that website and contacting the website owners to find out what kind of content they allow. This is a time-intensive process.

The last thing to discuss is the website’s history. A site with spammy backlinks or a previous history of blackhat content tactics or even being hit with a major update can yield a large-scale issue because it means you have to undo all the previous loss of trust. You may need to go back and manually remove toxic backlinks or try to remove old content that has caused a decline in rankings. Taking on these clients is a difficult task and may take even longer to correct, as Google will apply certain filters to your website until it is certain that you are no longer breaking the rules.

One of the fastest ways to boost rankings and sales is to consider focusing your SEO strategy on Bing. So many clients neglect Bing because it doesn’t get the traffic that Google does, but from testing, many in the SEO industry have found that Bing can yield really good results, and you can often rank rather quickly.

Bing requires a completely different strategy than Google does. We can see that Bing is very slow to pick up new pages, so one big tip for Bing is to install the Bing webmaster verification tag on your website and then use the manual submit tool. You can also submit a sitemap, but again, with Bing, it doesn’t index pages as quickly as Google and will often be very poor at picking up deep internal pages such as product pages on an e-commerce site.

With Bing you will also notice that long-tail searches simply don’t get the same amount of searches, as the users of Bing tend to be people who have it installed as the default search engine, so they are not as tech savvy as Google users. The best way to combat this is to aim for generic, broad keywords, but if you decide to go for long-tail keywords, then you should aim to do them in bulk.

If you target Bing, then you will notice much faster ranking results than with Google even if your website is new, but you should consider building out a large-scale website for Bing because you will simply require a larger volume of pages in order to win as each search term gets much less traffic.

In terms of speeding up the ranking results for Google, you could try boosting up your brand name searches. If you take a look at the analytics for your website, you will find many different variations of your business or brand name; these can all be optimised by getting in some backlinks with these alternative spellings or names. Since these have no competition, you can rank quickly, and it’s a very easy and fast method to boost business.

You should also look at implementing rich snippets and editing existing meta descriptions as a way to get a boost from pages that already get traffic from existing high rankings; these are very quick wins and can help build a site’s traffic levels, which are thought to be one of the factors that Google looks at.

Answering a client with “it depends” when they ask you about timescale is not the most professional answer, but as seen in this article, it is an honest answer. There are simply too many factors to consider, but one thing is clear, which is that you should always educate and explain to the client that SEO is a long-term process and really try to convince them that the right frame of mind is to invest in the long term to see the best benefits from SEO.

You should also explain that the SEO process is ever-evolving because of so many Google updates; this will allow you to reframe the client’s mindset and get them to understand that to stay on top of the game, they need to understand that they can’t just do SEO one time and forget about it. Like all processes in both business and advertising, it needs to evolve over time as new rules come to the forefront and change the rules of how the game is played.

These days link building is a very large topic in the SEO industry. Links are simply not as important as they used to be in the big SEO pie chart, but they are still one of the fundamentals. These days people in the SEO industry need to focus on getting better links rather than just getting a link from anywhere they can; being more selective is the way to win in modern SEO practices.

There are many different ways in which people acquire backlinks to boost up rankings, but one of the most effective, and perhaps the one that yields the best results, is digital PR. Earning media coverage for your website has multiple benefits, with the first being getting backlinks to your website from extremely high-quality websites with built-in traffic, authority, and great SEO metrics.

Many will disregard digital PR as a strategy, as they think it can only be done by large brands that have something interesting to share, but they are incorrect. Even the smallest of businesses can get noticed online these days, with many small business owners getting even more creative with their marketing efforts. There is no such thing as a small business these days; on the internet, every business can become an overnight viral sensation.

The power of digital PR is that it builds links, it builds social media shares, it builds viral marketing, and of course you get some direct traffic from the news websites themselves. All news websites want a great story with some viral element attached to it; they tend to get a lot of traffic based around celebrities, health trends, or even once-in-a-lifetime news stories. Small businesses need to get more creative when submitting to news websites, but in general you can always find a way to make your business newsworthy.

Digital PR is still a very new link-building method; however, we can see that branding is now forming a bigger part of the overall SEO picture. You can no longer just have a website that ranks; instead, what you want to do is to build a brand name that people know and trust. Putting together viral marketing campaigns is just one way of doing this, but with viral content, you often see that it’s very untargeted; you don’t get relevant links from sites within your industry, and most of the time you don’t get to really feature the brand name which you want to promote.

The best idea for digital PR seems to be analysis of top shared content and then focusing on what each of these pieces has in common. You should then find a way to make this relate back to your client’s brand and then promote both the idea and the company, never get caught up in one or the other; instead, never find a happy medium that will allow you the best of both worlds.

Just having your brand name mentioned by various websites is already a win. After you promote your brand name, you will find more searches for your brand are being done on Google. This will lead to Google giving you some more trust, but it will also lead to getting further attention for your website in general; more social media shares would be one example of this. These kinds of metrics will all start feeding into an overall picture that Google is developing of your business and brand name. In short, you want to get as much attention as possible for your business even if it doesn’t lead to an increase in sales or backlinks.

Volume of links is often what people want; everyone wants to hit the jackpot and get thousands of links from a single campaign, but this just isn’t realistic. What you want is some good coverage for your brand name that will filter in over months instead of a quick surge of links that fall off after a week. A steady volume of quality, related links over time will always beat having a huge spike in links followed by a drop-off.

You don’t need to be the most popular brand online to win; you need to have the most links from within your market. Getting a link from a website that is in the same market as you is incredibly hard to get due to the fact that you might be competitors. Google views these kinds of links as extremely hard to get and thus rewards them accordingly.

When putting together a digital PR campaign, you want to look at many different things. You want to look at which sites would be the best to submit to and how to create something interesting that the audience of that site would care about, and perhaps the most important metric is to figure out how you can align your client’s brand name with the angle you want to pitch. If you can’t make it fit, then obviously this strategy won’t work. You need to find a way to get the perfect blend, but you should also try to get some SEO benefit from the press releases themselves.

A digital PR campaign can get your client some direct traffic, especially if you submit it to high-traffic websites and mainstream news outlets, but let’s get it clear: you should still try to include some keywords in your campaign as you may be able to get the press release ranked directly, which can create many benefits for your client. You can get direct traffic, brand exposure, and also get a link back from a page that is ranking well on Google.

Since Google is getting smarter every single year, they can really put together a complete picture from content these days. It can take things like anchor text and figure out the larger context to see if it relates to the article that it’s in the middle of. Links that are placed in the middle of content tend to be the most powerful, and one of the things that Google wants to do is find some natural anchor text, so instead of keyword anchor text usage, try using the brand name on your press releases instead.

A good PR campaign is way more than just a single press release; it needs to be crafted to cover multiple angles. You always want to have multiple follow-ups, and if possible, get a conversation going about your brand on social media. To do this, you need some kind of narrative; you need to follow up a press release with another one that has an alternative spin or gives the reaction to the first one. This can help to keep your brand in the news and gives you further chances to create a narrative that you control.

Creating a positive spin around your brand name can be tricky; you always want to ensure that you think very carefully about your creative ideas and think about how they might backfire or be taken out of context by an audience. It’s a good idea to have a few people check them over before you go into full-scale launch mode. Try putting out a small-scale test run on a blog and see how people react. This can be as simple as putting up a blog post with a similar theme or creative idea and then testing the waters by posting it on LinkedIn or Twitter to gain some feedback.

The most critical aspect of digital PR is building trust in your brand but also having your brand name seen in as many high-traffic areas as possible. You have to attract eyeballs in order to have them know who you are; they can’t do that if they haven’t heard about you, so you really want to push for a site with nationwide readership so you can reach the maximum number of people within your country.

Brand building is more important than ever when it comes to the link-building process. Many who are from the old-school SEO mindset don’t understand that not getting a backlink isn’t the end of the world; as long as someone shares your content, mentions your brand name, or even reads your digital PR, then you have already started the process of them getting to know you. The new world is about creating branding messages that last a long time rather than a short-term spike.

The most important thing to remember about the link-building process is that, in general, the harder the link is to get, the more valuable it will be viewed by Google. Getting a link from Wikipedia, for example, shows that you have created a valuable resource, and since this site is checked over for accuracy, you get a very high-metric link from a trusted source. You only need to acquire a few of these links to really get a nice boost.

When thinking about building links, you should forgo the older methods that no longer hold as much value; things like article marketing and directory links in bulk simply no longer have as much effect. Instead, try to aim at the top of the pyramid and get the top-tier links that not everyone can get; these are the types of links you can get when you do a great job at building your brand and being trusted within an industry. With these links, you don’t need many of them, so you can really focus your efforts on the best strategies to get them.