„What’s a good SEO strategy for online business?“ is a question I get asked quite a lot. And for a good reason.

Having a solid SEO strategy is crucial for all those online businesses who don’t use paid traffic, which probably is the vast majority.

After the many Google updates, there are many discussions going on in the SEO space.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the SEO strategies online business owners should implement.

However, there are a few SEO experts who know what they’re doing – and luckily I got to interview one of them.

Please meet James Reynolds.

He’s the founder of Veravo, SEOSherpa and Clickjam. His three companies that focus on driving traffic for online business owners.

I’m pumped to publish this interview on my blog because James is a baller.

He’s been interviewed on Entrepreneur on Fire, appeared on TV twice in Dubai, and had some other decent media coverage.

In our interview, he outlines SEO strategies for online businesses that are proven to work.

You probably already know these SEO strategies:

Building backlinks to your blog, creating amazing content, building context on your pages.

In this interview, you’ll learn how to execute on each of those strategies.

(Including a funny example about SEO context between „thongs“ and „thongs“.)

James also covers some myths about SEO strategies that stopped working long ago, but still are implemented by some Internet business owners.

So without further ado, here’s the interview!

https://youtu.be/e9PwocCubdc

These are the links mentioned in the conversation:

• James‘ companies: Veravo,SEO Sherpa, Click Jam
• James‘ favorite keyword research tool: Market Samurai
• BuzzSumo for outreach
• Ahrefs for research
• Google Keyword Planner

The SEO Strategy For Online Business – Writeup

In case you don’t have time to watch the interview, yet want to know what SEO tactics James shared that you can implement in your online business, here’s a short write-up for you:

Myth 1: Bold or italicized text has more importance to Google.

You want to keep your site looking user-friendly and looking great so that your readers build up trust.

If you were to use unreasonably highlighted text like bold, red color or italics, you just make your site look scammy and will immediately destroy the trust.

Myth 2: The more backlinks, the better you’ll rank.

Google tries to tell us that backlinks aren’t that important for ranking, yet they are one of the biggest factors.

However, not all backlinks are created equal.

Some backlinks hold more value for SEO than others.

For example, my guest posts for the GoDaddy Garage blog include backlinks to my site, which are built organically and should be quite relevant for Google.

I could create way more backlinks by spinning my articles and submitting them to article directories than submitting guest posts that require a few hours of work.

However, those article directory backlinks would rather hurt my SEO strategy, as they don’t contain ANY value for my blog audience. And Google somehow seems to know that 😉

How to build organic backlinks

James said that you needed to have great, quality, content to generate organic backlinks.

Ask yourself:

Why would anyone link to this post? How can you make this piece of content so great that others link to it?

Online business owners also should include outreach in their SEO strategy.

Outreach means that you’re not only focusing on creating content, but also actively promoting that content to people you think will like it.

Renowned Internet marketers like Derek Halpern recommends spending 20% of your time on content creation and 80% on content promotion.

Another SEO strategy to get more shares is to include influential people in your content, giving them a shout-out. That increases the chances of having them promote the post.

Famous examples are round-up posts that include between 7 – 50 (or more) experts in the field you’re in.

Questions to ask yourself for creating great content are:

• What questions do my readers ask?
• What auto-completion does Google offer for my keywords?
• How can you improve already existing content?
• What results do you get from using BuzzSumo or the content explorer inside Ahrefs?

Conclusion

Creating and executing on solid SEO strategies still is important for online businesses, maybe more important than ever.

Google is getting smarter about using synonyms for your keywords, analyzing the context and backlinks, and keeps tweaking their algorithm.

I think James shared very actionable advice on keyword research, backlink building, and content creation.

This interview can serve as a starting point to work on your SEO strategy for your online business if you haven’t focused on SEO yet.

Please note that the write-up of this interview only captures a few SEO strategies James shared.

The interview itself contains more actionable, in-depth advice – way too much to post it here in a format that’s easy to consume.

So if you don’t have time to listen to the interview, bookmark this post and make sure to come back later!