Is content still king? Yes—but any king who does his job well enjoys the help of numerous advisors. In the same sense, content still needs help from SEO to get the job done right. After all, you don’t simply crank out some “good content” every month and achieve amazing rankings.

While this certainly helps you with SEO, fix these mistakes to avoid missing out on some nice gains:

1. Not Optimizing Your Keywords

Yes, Google still needs keyword optimization in 2022, and it always will. The platform requires some way to identify where your content should rank, and your keywords help provide the ability to do just that.

Big changes with Google over the years relate to how you approach SEO. For example, blog post and web page titles must include the focus keyword but in a non-obvious manner. That keyword—and corresponding variations—need to appear in your content only once or twice, or possibly more frequently than that. This can make a huge difference, giving you the ability to rank for that specific keyword and receive more search traffic from that ranking.

Otherwise, Google may simply rank you however it wants—meaning you may never hit the top 5 for the keywords chosen, resulting in less (or no) traffic and a dent in sales.

2. Not Using Internal Linking in a Strategic Manner

Helping your users navigate to areas of your website they’ll find useful, internal links also boost your SEO. The “link juice” from external links points to your website’s pages, each of which contain a few links. External links get some of that juice and then pass it on to the pages they link to.

Strategic internal linking can pass link juice to pages you want to rank high, and you’ll also want to optimize your internal link anchor text with various keywords you want to rank for.

3. Not Optimizing Your Videos or Images

Yes, this still gets overlooked. Images have “alt text,” a tag providing info about an image. It’s an appropriate place to put your keywords, which display if the image fails to load for whatever reason. It also improves your SEO as well.

With respect to videos, place them all in a single directory on your web server and create a site map—making it easy for search engines to find and index them. Videos also have a “meta description,” a natural place to insert a keyword or two.

Wrapping Up

See? None of these tips are difficult (or time-consuming!).

With these strategies in your arsenal, you’ll enjoy better rankings for additional phrases—leading to a boost in customers and sales.