By Rebecca Riserbato

Back in 2017, HubSpot experienced something that had never happened before — our blog’s monthly traffic flattened. Even worse, it started to decline. So, after months of stressing over the mysterious cause of our blog’s traffic plateau, we decided to sit down, chug a bunch of coffee, and find the culprit.

We discovered that our editorial strategy of brainstorming topics and relying on our intuition to determine our audience’s content preferences was no longer enough. We decided to pivot and focus our energies on the channel that has consistently generated most of our blog’s traffic for its entire existence — organic search.

Today, years after we adjusted our organic strategy, we’ve exceeded the majority of our monthly traffic goals and even broke some monthly traffic records. Needless to say, we’re thrilled (and relieved) that our organic strategy fueled our traffic boost and shattered the great traffic plateau of 2017. In this post, we’ll outline the essential tips that helped us drive our organic strategy, with insight from HubSpot SEO experts.

Download this checklist and save it to your desktop to check-off an SEO tip every time you complete it.

1. Spend as much time on the SERPs as you do in tools.

Even though an algorithm dictates a search engine’s results page (SERPs) rankings, the algorithm rewards web publishers that craft the best content on the internet.

Because of this, it’s important to understand search intent. To accomplish this, we analyze a keyword’s SERP and determine the problems users are trying to solve when searching for this query.

Aja Frost, the Head of English SEO at HubSpot, says, “Yes, tools offer us a ton of information. But that information is often based on incomplete, out-of-date, or biased data sets. I encourage SEOs to combine the insights they’re getting from their tools with real-time clues on the SERPs. Every time you decide to target a new keyword, refresh a piece of content, or diagnose a page or section of pages with irregular traffic, take a look at what’s coming up for the main queries on Google.”

Depending on your goal, Frost says to pay attention to:

• Search features,
• The type of content that’s ranking (product pages, listicles, tutorials, etc.),
• The websites that are ranking (databases, businesses, media sites, directories, etc.),
• How far down the page the first organic result appears,
• How your page shows up (title, meta description, date, jump links, schema if applicable, etc.).

When you conduct these kinds of searches, “Don’t forget to use an incognito window, frequently clear your cache, cookies, and history, and run your searches on both a desktop and phone,” Frost adds.

2. Master the SERP overlap test.

While in SERPs, Frost conducts a SERP overlap test. She says, “I use this test all the time to determine whether to target two-plus queries with a single piece of content.”

Now, you might be wondering, what is the SERP overlap test?

Frost …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron