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I know what you’re thinking—you see the word holistic, and your mind immediately jumps to acai bowls and yoga wellness retreats with a long-haired guru encouraging you to connect your mind and body.

While the term is often used in the health and wellness world, it has recently found a place in the digital marketing world as well…and it is important for small business owners to pay attention. Approaching search engine optimization (SEO) in a holistic way requires a shift away from traditional, keyword-heavy SEO and, instead, creating quality content in a way that is meeting the needs of your clients and customers.

Old-School vs. Holistic SEO

Traditional SEO is structured around keywords, backlinks, rankings, and creating websites and content in which keywords can be integrated.

The problem with old-school SEO is that it prioritises earning a higher ranking using keywords over meeting the needs of the people who are using those keywords in their searches. Let’s say, for example, you’ve written a blog post using the keywords “interior design trends” and, according to the SEO plug-in you’re using, you haven’t used your keywords enough in your blog headers. Traditional SEO would insist you cram “interior design trends” into your headers, regardless of how clunky and repetitive it sounded.

New-school SEO, however, takes a step back, looks at the big picture, and says, “Not so fast. How is this going to serve our reader?”

The beauty of holistic SEO is that it takes the focus off the search engine and places it on the search users. How are people going to engage with your brand, and what can you do to make the experience more enjoyable and valuable to them?

Embracing Holistic SEO for Your Business

Creating an online presence that ranks well in search engines requires more than writing blog posts and creating backlinks. Here are 4 ways you can embrace holistic SEO for your business.

1. Don’t Discount Social Media

Just because search engines aren’t keeping up with how many followers you have doesn’t mean social media holds no value when it comes to SEO. If you write a killer blog post on a topic relevant to your industry and share it on social media only to have it go viral, that can absolutely affect SEO ranking. After all, the more your industry peers cite your blog in their own posts, the more backlinks you receive from third-party sites, and the higher your ranking rises.

2. Take A Long, Hard, Objective Look at Your Website

Are you implementing responsive design? If you aren’t, that should be priority number one. Customers should enjoy a flawless experience on your site whether they are visiting from a mobile phone, tablet, or laptop.

Are you creating content around relevant, long-tail keywords? Don’t limit yourself to blogs—consider adding helpful videos, shareable graphics, and downloadable e-books that provide valuable information to visitors while using those long tails in a way that feels organic rather than forced.

How’s your internal linking strategy? Internal linking helps search engines find valuable content within your site they may have otherwise missed. It’s important that internal links are relevant and take visitors to valuable content.

Is your site readable? This may sound silly, but visitors aren’t going to stay on your site, no matter how visually appealing it may be, if they can’t read your content. Is your text sized correctly? Is it visible against the background? Keep an eye out for potential issues like using a light background color with a light text color (or vice versa—dark on dark is equally hard to read), or having text that runs over an image.

3. Review Old/Evergreen Content

How’s it looking? Does it need an SEO facelift? Making sure older (but still relevant) content is SEO friendly saves you from reinventing the wheel while earning you some new backlinks.

Start by finding your old content that garnered the most traffic. Do a little research to see if there have been any significant advancements/changes within the industry—after all, what was relevant in 2018 may be old hat in 2021.

4. Don’t Forget About Emails

Make sure the emails you’re sending out are SEO-friendly by including keywords in your subject lines. Take a couple of the more intriguing points in the body of your email and create “small bites”, or quotes, that can be shared on social media. Make sure these bites include links to your website content.

Let your emails drive traffic to your website by including links to recent blog posts and encourage email recipients to click to read.

Traditional SEO is still valuable…but it may be time to broaden the definition to better accommodate the more customer-centric SEO of today. If you are interested in creating online content that is SEO-friendly and looking for a little guidance, contact us at Digital Canteen. We know how to employ expert SEO strategies that will help your website show up at the top of any search list.

Thanks for reading,
Digital Canteen Team
02-9025-4304