Sustainable SEO: How to focus on a lasting SEO strategy

You’re probably familiar with SEO, but what do we mean by sustainable SEO? Well, it’s all about spending your time on the right things in order to outrank competitors in the search engines! But how do you keep doing SEO in an efficient and successful way? How do you keep ranking in the long run? If you’re not in it for the short-term success, but for the long haul. And is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a sustainable SEO solution? Read all about sustainable SEO in this blog post! 

What is sustainable SEO? 

Ranking in search engines usually doesn’t happen overnight. It’s hard work. So, if you do succeed in ranking high in Google, you want to keep ranking that high in Google. A good SEO strategy takes time and effort and is always focused on long-term results. In order to have a sustainable SEO strategy, you need to comply with Google’s mission. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google wants to give people the information they find accessible and useful. That means that you need to make sure that your website provides just that. 

No games and no tricks

In the old days, SEO was all about tricks. Back then, you could write a text and mention your keyword in every other sentence. That would help with your ranking. Writing white text on a white background could fool Google. However, Google has gotten amazingly smart in understanding texts. Google’s algorithm is trying to mimic a human being. It tries to read texts like human beings. Therefore, it is not a good idea to stuff your writing with keywords, because texts like that are awful to read. Imagine yourself reading an article about car tires where almost every line has the phrase “car tires” in it, most likely you will get annoyed and stop reading.

SEO should not be a game. SEO should not be about tricks. We often joke that the acronym of SEO actually stands for Seriously Effortful Optimization. This is because SEO requires efforts to succeed. Writing high-quality content, providing a good user experience (UX), and building a beautiful and accessible website are a lot of work. Shortcuts often lead to suboptimal results. Games and tricks lead to a bad user experience and penalties by Google.

Helpful content is the way to go

The many different updates of Google – Panda, Hummingbird, BERT – have all shown us that Google ranks texts that are easy to read. Above all, Google wants to serve its users with accessible and useful information. So it’s important to try and win those rankings by making quality content and not by trying to trick the algorithm.

In fact, Google’s latest update was called the ‘helpful content update’, because that’s the kind of content they want to deliver to users. Its goal is to make the search results better with more original, helpful content — content made for people, by people. From now on, we expect (more than ever) to see Google rewarding content that gives readers a satisfying experience and demoting content written only to please search engines.

Some tips on how to do sustainable SEO 

What should you be doing if you focus on ranking in Google in the long run? Let’s check out our three top tips!

1. Write some awesome cornerstone content

First and foremost, make sure to write some really good articles on your website. It is of great importance that you put effort into writing articles with content that is evergreen and valuable for years to come. Those articles should be lengthy, well-optimized, readable little gems. Moreover, make sure to put in some SEO love and update such articles regularly.

2. Get your internal linking structure in good shape

Google has a hard time figuring out which content is the most important. Your internal linking structure is really important to help Google figure out where the most important content on your website is located. Internal linking is something you need to maintain and update regularly.

3. Regularly do keyword research

You need to make sure you’re writing about the topics your audience wants to read about. And that could very well change over time. So, every now and then you need to get inside the heads of your readers again. Which topics do they like, which words are they using to search and find your content? Is your keyword strategy still up to date or does it need refinement?

Read more: Save time in SEO with these tips »

Conclusion: Sustainable SEO needs to be part of your routine!

In order to really have a sustainable SEO strategy, you need to have a routine. You just need to make sure to regularly evaluate what you’re doing. You can definitely use tools like Semrush for your keyword research or even an AI tool for your content.

Nonetheless, you should never stop thinking and evaluating yourself, as sustainable SEO has to do with carefully thinking about what content would benefit your user most. If you keep your audience in mind, you’ll always be on the right track. Using our Yoast SEO plugin will always help you to focus on the most important things. Keep aiming for those green traffic lights and create a great user experience — it’s a strategy that will always stand the test of time.

Disclosure: This blog post contains sponsored links.