There’s a lot of information about SEO out there that business owners can learn from. In fact, a good number of the free blog post, articles and videos actually contain quality content. However, SEO is a big topic and it’s easy to miss or overlook information that can help you build a successful campaign. Here are three often overlooked SEO musts that many business owners need to focus on.

1. Onpage Factor for Content
Most website owners already know about onpage optimization factors. However, they seem to miss the mark when it comes to their content. While most have their title, h1 tags and image alt tags all set with the target keyword, they haven’t optimized for semantic search. Semantic search is about connecting the search intent, context and relationships between words in order to provide the most relevant results to the user.

Linkassistant has a great guide to optimizing for semantic search. It’s recommended that instead of trying to build content around the keyword, you should aim to build content around that topic. So if the keyword is “best sources of vitamin C,” you wouldn’t try to fit that keyword into your content enough times to get the search engines to pick up what your page is about. You’d actually build a content around that topic. This should be done with the searcher’s intent in mind to provide value to the user.

Another big part of it is focusing on latent semantic indexing. This is a technology that helps Google understand the context and relationships between words in your content. For example, the color orange is different from the fruit orange. If you wanted to write about the fruit, you’d use keywords like fresh, vitamin C, fruit, peel, pulp, sweet and acidic inside the content. Content that uses LSI keywords tend to rank higher than content that is not optimized with these keywords.

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2. Social Media Marketing
Google has publicly said that social signals are a ranking factor for SEO. However, many website owners are still not taking social media seriously enough. They’ve set up social share buttons on their site and post on their social accounts once a in a while. However, their social media activities have taken a backseat to their SEO and other digital marketing strategies. Part of the problem lies in not knowing how impactful social media is to a SEO campaign.

CognitiveSEO has a lot of strong evidence showing the impact social media has on search engine rankings. In their data, you’ll see that stronger social presence, higher share counts on social media and more social media activity correlates to higher search engine rankings. The first position always seems to have far more social media activity than the other positions. This alone should prove how impactful social media is to search engine rankings.

Social media is also a significant source of traffic and backlinks as well. Putting out content in social media can lead to your content being published or linked to from other sites. Social media posts tend to end up in the search engine listings, which can result in free traffic to your site.

3. Engagement Metrics
Google is already using one engagement metric in their ranking factor already – load times. It’s very likely that they’ll be looking at other engagement metrics that will affect their ranking factors in the future. Some to watch out for include time spent on site, number of page views, and website bounce rates. What you need to know is that engagement metrics are not only for SEO rankings, they can be used to help you design a better website or create better content so that you can get more value from your SEO campaign.

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Neil Patel has a list of engagement factors that will help you future proof your SEO campaigns and get a better ROI from your. The most obvious one to start out with is your clickthrough rate. You must have a strong meta description tag to draw clicks from the search results. So if the keyword is “medical training,” make sure you are concise, descriptive and compelling enough about the topic. Mention the type of sales training, the industries your site covers, and the big benefit of what you’re offering.

Some others to focus on include your visual design, readability of your font, navigation path design, visual hierarchy, website structure, breadcrumb links, device/browser compatibility and load time optimization. As you can see, there’s a lot of design work involved in SEO, so you will want to work with a web designer to help you optimize your site for engagement.

Those are three overlooked SEO musts that you need to apply to your campaign today. They will help you attain higher rankings, achieve higher ROI numbers from your campaigns and help future-proof your SEO campaign.