What is White Hat SEO & How it Helps you?
How White Hat SEO Relates to Higher Conversion Rates?
With search engines gaining a lot of recognition and people relying on them more and more often, the appearance of your site and your business on their result pages has become crucial. Thus, search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a core digital marketing technique and the most efficient mean of attracting organic traffic. However, not every SEO strategy is ethical and right and not every effort will lead to higher conversion. Therefore, you better know the difference, so that you can achieve more with your investment.
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
In the land of search engine optimization, there are two general paths – the white hat and the black hat one. The white hatters are led by the pursuit of quality. They understand that what search engines value most today is what end users value most, too, and that is quality. Therefore, they optimize the sites so that their entire performance is better – higher speed, better architecture, good partners’ links, useful content, and much more. On the contrary are the black hatters who do not care for the end users and the guidelines set by the search engines. All they care about is impressing the machines and manipulating the rules to get some short-term results and rankings. And as you can imagine, cheating doesn’t set all your marketing efforts on the right track.
Why is Black Hat SEO Dangerous for Your Business
Though fundamentally wrong, black hat SEO yielded some pretty good results once. Now, Google has updated and improved its algorithms so well that the results of such SEO practices could be just temporary and in the long run, the site could be heavily penalized with its ranking being lowered or even completely removed from the index. That is why, there are certain pseudo-SEO techniques that you need to avoid at all costs like purchasing links, creating duplicate content by using materials from other sites for your own, creating fake accounts and attracting fake links, or reporting your competitors for spam, when they’ve done nothing wrong. Of course, there are many more creative ways to manipulate the system that you better avoid. As a rule of thumb, do nothing that doesn’t add value to your end user and you cannot go wrong.
What are White Hat’s Best Practices?
Once you’ve realized that white hat SEO is the way to go, you better get to know its core and most efficient practices.
Valuable Content
Valuable content is undoubtedly key for better search engine rankings. Create an article about a certain topic, which is more informative, descriptive, and extensive than all the materials of your competitors and Google will, for sure, appreciate that. With the goal of outperforming competitors by adding more value to customers, the skyscraper technique for content creation emerged. Based on your keyword research and the insights of what your prospective clients search most often, find topics they may be interested in and study them and the available resources in detail. Then, create a material which is more creative, more well-thought, and more comprehensive than any other and you will not only attract more users but also you will easily get more links.
Link Building instead of Link Buying
In the world of search engine optimization, links mean authority and generally, the more you get, the better your ranking will be. However, this applies only to quality links – links, coming from websites with good domain ratings (DR). So today, the idea is no longer to get a high number of links but to get a good amount of quality ones. This automatically means that buying links in bulk is not an option. Therefore, aim at attracting links from websites, which are close to you in terms of topic and reach, build partnership relationships with their editors and negotiate links only on the basis of quality and relevance. And here again, the quality content is the key to success. If you have a page that brings a lot of value to the general audience, other websites would love to link to it.
Optimized Site offering Good User Experience
A couple of years ago, SEO was all about technical optimization and the user experience didn’t matter that much for the ranking. As Google optimized its algorithms, the design and the usability of the pages, as well as the overall user experience, started making a substantial difference. Therefore, always put yourself in the shoes of your users and clients and think about their experience on the site and how it could be improved. Having a good UX is not rocket science. And if you are not 100% sure about something, never hesitate to conduct an A/B test.
How does White Hat SEO Contribute to Conversion Rate Optimization?
In order for your marketing strategy to be implemented successfully, all its elements need to be integrated and to work together for the common business goals. And in the bag of digital marketing tools, the SEO and the conversion rate optimization are among the most closely related ones. The well-done search engine optimization modifies the feel of your site and improves the overall user experience. And this, on the other hand, leads to the higher conversion rate you are aiming at.
