Tamara says: “You should always start with researching your audience, and align with your marketing team because SEO and marketing strategies should always go hand in hand.

By this, I mean that you should conduct thorough research of your audience – of their demographics, needs, and their behaviour online – on your website and on the web. And then, according to these analytics, tailor the strategy that's best for your users and not the search engine algorithms and crawlers.”

What software do you use to identify the information that you're looking for about the user?

“The best ones are definitely Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which give the most accurate and real-time information about user sessions and the behaviour of your visitors on your website – as well as the performance of the content and the external backlinks that you have. Gather all of this information and compare it, maybe using some other external tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic, Moz, and using their own traffic and organic keyword metrics. Then you're able to analyse and feel what your visitors need and what they're looking for on your website.”

How do you map those metrics to specific user needs?

“I like to gather user feedback. Whether you are starting a new website or you are jumping onto a project to manage an existing domain, it's good to gather user feedback and actually measure the visit sessions, average sessions, and maybe bounce rate as well, to see how your users react to your content.

I also like to follow all the Google updates and make sure that the content aligns with the best practices. For example, if we are about to publish a cluster of articles and we are targeting a specific audience, it's good to conduct A/B testing as well, to see how certain groups of users are reacting to one type of content versus the other type of content. Then, to look at the keyword intent and how users react to your content according to that.

You’re starting from basic analytical metrics, conducting them, and then tailoring the strategy into something that actually works.”

Do you start with some examples of user needs that you talk to your audience about, or do you let your audience tell you what their needs are?

“It's usually a mix of the two. First, of course, we like to measure what the competitors are doing and how their keywords are reacting to users – how the users are seeing the keywords on the web and actually using them for their intent, whether it's informational or commercial intent, or whether it’s your own intent with the content.

Then we compare this to the actual behaviour of the users on our pages.”

In terms of having conversations with users, how do you go about doing that?

“Usually, it's online surveys and gathering feedback by email, or maybe putting some questions into a newsletter. It's usually an online conversation rather than just asking them in person.

In terms of software, we use our integrated CRM for this. From recent experience, it was more about customers and the links being integrated, and the users that converted to leads from the links.

We were tracking the links through UTM codes and then measuring the conversions that led to actual purchases, registrations on the website, or filling out the contact forms. We were tracking the path from the link and from the keywords to actual intent, how users were feeling about it, and how quickly this happened or if they're bounced back from the page.

We’re using Google Analytics for tracking the UTM, because it's only available through Google Analytics, and then tracking from Google Search Console later on.”

Are you liking using GA4?

“So far, yes.”

Do you find yourself having conversations with other marketing teams about the user and about what the user wants?

“Actually, no. Everything that we do is internal because, in my company, I am the only person who does data analytics about users, and the type of SEO work that we do is mostly off-page.

Every project that we manage is different and depends on what the client's marketing team is doing. The type of information and data that I get is usually third hand and, from there, I get to analyse and compare to the beginning of the strategy.”

You also talk about evading spam risks during Core Updates. What spam risks are you talking about?

“We've seen a lot of manual penalty activities in the March 2024 Update. There were 3 major steps in this Core Update.

There were a lot of activities around manual penalties, which means that not only was the SpamBrain algorithm analysing the pages, but there were also people from the Google team who actually went through the pages and evaluated that they were not following the Google guidelines, and that they were using manipulative and spammy techniques.

This involves manipulating through keywords, by overstuffing the keywords in the content and trying to build up points for ranking signals – which is something that you shouldn't do. Your content and backlinks should be tailored to the user and providing the most valuable information they can quickly get, and maybe continue their journey, clicking on the backlink to the client's website, or staying on the page as long as necessary to convert.

By avoiding these spammy techniques, it's more likely that your website will stay ranking for a longer time without any additional effort. By building evergreen content that's tailored for the user, not for the algorithm, you're going to avoid manual penalties or algorithm penalties.”

Should you just target your link building strategies at driving traffic now, not the algorithm?

“Yes. It's kind of a mix of the algorithm and the users. When we look back at Google’s guidelines, and the Webmaster Guidelines, everything is user-centric, and the attention is turned towards the user. From content to backlink structure, it shouldn't be manipulative. It shouldn't feel plastic or artificial to the extent that you get penalized.

But, of course, SEO exists because of algorithms and rankings. We should take the algorithms into consideration, but we should also remember that algorithms exist to serve the users and visitors on Google. It circles back to the users again.

Unfortunately, this has not been common practice in the last 7 or 8 years. We can see that a majority of the web is stuffed with guest posting websites and websites that were made purely for link building purposes and building endless amounts of content for no reason at all. I really can't remember the last time I read an article about something that I wanted to find quickly on Google that didn't feel fake or written by AI or just an overloaded content writer.”

Has that driven you to another search engine or are you still using Google as your main search platform?

“I still use Google because most information is gathered on Google. It has the biggest coverage. I don't feel like other search engines have developed an algorithm that’s good enough to provide accurate information.

From my experience, I haven’t seen a lot of accurate and real-time information on other search engines. It's usually giving old, outdated stuff, so I still stick to Google.”

When you look at competitors, what mistakes do you find that they're making with their link building strategies?

“I would say a lack of relevancy, which is also going back to user experience and having your links exist and live in healthy and relevant relationships with other websites. Building a link and publishing a page just for the sake of having the link has been proven not to be good anymore. It can actually get a big penalty from Google, as we have seen in various examples.

Focusing on a website category and topic is a very good way to avoid these penalties. Even if you are still building links or purchasing links, and using that for your strategy, it's the best way to stay low and to have a sustainable link portfolio by building to relevant websites.”

What metrics do you use to track user-focused link building strategies?

“Organic traffic is the best one. I like to start just by looking at how healthy the traffic is, and if the users are finding this website to be popular and trendy – if they're visiting it continuously. I like to look at the last 12 to 18 months and see the traffic trend.

I also like to look at the keyword portfolio of the website, the keyword anchor cloud, because I want to see if the website is actually ranking for the topics and the keywords that it's supposed to rank for. If I see something that is a bit off, and it seems like it's been built for other topics, or topics that are not a good fit for the website, I suspect that something fishy is going on and it would not be a good neighbourhood for my link.

Of course, regarding the keywords, I would look at the search intent of the keywords in the articles. For example, if the website is publishing informational content, if it's a blog, but I find a lot of commercial or call-to-action anchors – I would suspect that this website is probably building links for money or that it manipulates the content in some way.”

Why do you use the traffic trend over 12 to 18 months?

“Because previous research showed that, from a year or a year and a half of the traffic journey, looking back at this trend, you can see/predict how the traffic will look in the next 3 or 6 months. Then, if there are big spikes or drops in this period of time, you can suspect that this domain is not stable enough. You wouldn't be sure about its health and the future health of its traffic.

But if you look too far in the past, if you look 3 years back, it doesn’t prove enough because it's too big of a gap in time. SEO can change within a few days. The penalties can happen, and the traffic can drop 90-95% within a few days. Looking back 2-3 years or more is not that relevant but looking back a year to a year and a half, and seeing the journey of the traffic, can show a lot about the website.”

What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I believe that they shouldn't focus on automated stuff. Again, because everything is user-centric and focused on real human beings. Automating a lot of stuff has proven in many ways (especially since the March Core Update) that it's not efficient, or at least it's not efficient in the long term.

Also, obsessing with vanity metrics is not trendy anymore, so I politely ask my colleagues from the SEO world to just focus on users and real live traffic rather than domain authorities and rankings.”

Tamara Novitović is Head of SEO at Bazoom Group, and you can find her over at Bazoom.com.