In a world of viral content, investing in your business’s long-term success is more important than ever. Very few people—if any—have achieved stability from 15 minutes of fame. Compound SEO is a strategy that can help your business unlock sustainable growth and withstand the test of time.
Even if you’ve heard of SEO, compound SEO may be new to you. Compound means “to make up a composite whole.” In chemistry, a compound is a substance made of two or more elements is a compound. You may have heard chefs refer to compound butter, which is a butter that has a had a flavoring element mixed in.
When you first hear the term compound SEO, you might assume it refers to an SEO strategy combining elements from several different strategies. However, in this case, we use the word compound the way it is used in banking. When you put money in a savings account, you periodically earn a percentage of that money on top of your deposit—interest. Simple interest depends on how much money you initially put into the account. If you choose a savings account with simple interest, you will earn the same amount of interest every time.
However, if your interest rate is compounded, you’ll earn interest based on the total money in your savings account, including other interest you’ve already earned. This means that the longer you leave money in the account without withdrawing it, the amount of interest you earn each period will also grow.
This is the same concept behind compound SEO. Compound SEO strategies are designed to help accelerate your website’s growth rate over time.
First of all, what does SEO mean?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In simple terms, this means making it more likely people will find your website when they search for the products or services you offer.
Search engines like Google are sets of complex algorithms. These algorithms do three things. First, they crawl the internet for new or updated content. Next, they index that content, storing and organizing it in a database. Finally, when someone enters a search query, they rank content. This means they look at all the content they’ve indexed to find what is most relevant to the question being asked. Google will then display the content from most relevant to least relevant on the search engine results page (SERP).
Most of us rarely go beyond the first SERP. Search engine optimization is the process of designing your site and content on it in a way that convinces Google’s algorithms to rank you higher in the results when potential customers search for specific keywords.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing the content on your website. This includes incorporating keywords and labeling your content with clear meta tags. When working on your on-page SEO, the main goal is to make it easier for search engine crawlers to understand what your page is about. Instead of using long paragraphs, try breaking big blocks of text up into groups of 2 or 3 sentences. Use headings and subheadings wherever they’re appropriate. Adding images, videos, and multimedia elements can also improve your rankings.
Technical SEO
While on-page SEO tends to focus more on the front end of your website, technical SEO focuses on the back end. Site structure, responsiveness, and loading speed affect how a search engine ranks your page. Search engines want to send users to web pages where they can easily find what they need. Search engines will not want to send users to your website if it is difficult to navigate, takes forever to load, or isn’t mobile-friendly.
Off-Page SEO
Technical and on-page SEO all have to deal with your site, but content on other sites can also affect your rankings. Search engines factor in your website’s reputation when ranking your content. If other people link back to your website on theirs (backlinking) or like, comment, or share your content via social media (social signaling), it shows that your website is trustworthy and engaging.
Long-Term vs. Short-Term Effects of SEO
Most of the time, when digital marketing companies talk about SEO, they talk about compound SEO, even if they don’t label it that way. This is because most companies emphasize SEO as a long-term marketing strategy compared to other marketing methods, such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
We like to specify when we are talking about compound SEO because we acknowledge that optimizing your web pages can also have immediate results. By implementing meta tags and keywords that resonate better with your target audience and more closely match your brand voice, you can get the attention of search engine crawlers and increase organic traffic to your site in as little as one week.
However, while that initial bump in traffic is nice, it pales in comparison to the long-term effects SEO can have on your business. When SEO is done right, your site traffic keeps growing. More importantly, your rate of growth should also grow over time.
In school, you probably learned about speed and acceleration. If you graph distance over time when an object is cruising at a consistent speed, you get a nice straight line. However, if you graph distance over time while the speed is getting faster—accelerating—you get a line that curves upward and starts reaching higher numbers much quicker.
Now replace distance with how many visitors find your website via organic search. Compound SEO helps your business accelerate, not just cruise.
Crafting Compound SEO Content
You need to run regular site performance checks and audits to improve your technical SEO. However, both on-page and off-page SEO depend on the content you put on your site. While keywords and meta descriptions are important, search engines consider many other factors when deciding how to rank your page. Search engine algorithms are most likely to reward your website by placing you at the top of the SERPs when you produce in-depth, valuable, evergreen content. This is why many companies add a blog to their website.
In-Depth Content
Google wants to point users toward the content that will be the most helpful to them. Articles and blogs that provide only brief summaries or surface-level discussions of a topic are not particularly attractive to users or search engine algorithms. Instead, they want to see long-form content that goes into detail about the topic. Blogs and articles at least 1,500 words long consistently perform best on the SERPS.
Valuable Content
Posting 1,500 words of fluff isn’t going to cut it, either. You want your content to provide value to your audience. Content that provides important, helpful information increases the likelihood that your other sites will link back to your URL, or users will like, comment, or share your post on social media.
Evergreen Content
Posting content about the latest trend or breaking news can give you a quick boost in traffic. However, visitors won’t have a reason to visit that page once that trend fades. The best strategy for compound SEO is to produce evergreen content—content that will always be useful to customers when they visit your site. You can also periodically update content to stay relevant.
How to Do Compound SEO
Now that you know what compound SEO is and why you should be doing it, all that’s left is to put it into practice. Here’s how to implement compound SEO on your website:
Set goals
With any long-term project or strategy, it’s best to start with the end in mind. What are you hoping to achieve through implementing compound SEO? Whether it’s more visits, a higher conversion rate, or longer page visits, make your goal measurable and put a deadline on it. For example, if you choose traffic, your goal should be something like “increase organic site traffic by at least 400% in six months.”
Choose keywords
Keywords are integral to any SEO strategy. They are the phrases potential customers will type into the search engine to find your business. Choosing the best keywords is a balancing act that requires research. If you pick a keyword or phrase that’s too specific, very few people will search for it and find your site. However, general keywords are hard to compete with.
You want to look for long-tail keywords—keywords that are 3 to 5 words long. These mimic the average search query and are more specific. In your research, try to identify long-tail keywords with lower competition that accurately describe your products or services.
Analyze and adapt
If you have specific, measurable goals, it is easier to tell how close you are to meeting them. You should constantly check your website’s key performance indicators to see how much progress you are making toward your goal. If you don’t seem to be hitting the right milestones, that’s a sign that you need to go back to the drawing board and find a way to improve your strategy.
