To stay up to date within the SEO industry it’s important to constantly test and review new processes and keep a close eye on what industry leaders are up to. It is for this reason that we like to read the American-based Search Engine Journal, which was founded by Loren Baker, who has been closely following the SEO industry since 2003. This week, one of SEJ’s staff writers, Anna Crowe, shared an infographic that details what 65 top SEO professionals are currently focusing their efforts on. Here are the main points:

On-Site And Technical SEO

A bulk of all SEO work is technical SEO or on-site, with 25.7% of all SEOs focusing on a combination of On-site and technical SEO, 14.2% doing on-site only and 9.5 doing technical only. We tend to bundle on-site and technical SEO together, as these are the main tasks that are carried out during the first months of an SEO campaign. On-site SEO deals with the written content, titles, headers, images, videos, and various other elements. Technical SEO is mainly site architecture, website design and coding, server optimisation and, these days especially, optimisation for mobile devices.

15.8% Off-Site Only

However, a large percentage still focuses entirely on link building and other off-site activities, such as social media, local citations, video marketing and guest blogging. These methods are still very effective in some industries – the trick is to know which industries they work best for.

Creating Quality Content

SEJ then asked SEOs what search tasks they spend most of the working day on. Unsurprisingly, 71.9% said that they spend most time of their time creating quality web content, with only 28.1% focusing on non-content-related tasks.

Our own tests over the last few years have shown that good quality content aids ranking more than anything else. It is no longer enough to hastily write up a business home page and “about us” page, and then hope that the site ranks well in your chosen industry. All content needs to be optimised for best performance, and websites need fresh content on a regular basis to stay in Google’s good books.

Content tasks also include keyword research, building relevant backlinks, editing HTML code such as metadata and carrying out mobile optimisation. It is actually surprising that the figure is not a little higher, although for smaller, younger businesses, there is a need to focus as much on the new on-site content as the non-content tasks.

The Biggest Challenge?

The biggest challenge that most SEOs are experiencing is building a good, healthy and relevant backlink profile, with 28.5% of all SEOs admitting to struggling with link building. Other areas where many SEOs struggle include mobile optimisation (17.9%) and content creation (17.9%). These two areas really should be the focus of any SEO campaign today. If you are not building a well-optimised, fast loading, mobile friendly website, you are not doing real SEO!

Our Thoughts On SEO?

While it is great to know what these SEO experts are focusing on at the moment, it is important to also understand that an effective SEO campaign needs to be carefully tailored to the specific needs of a business.

From our experience, all companies are different and require the application of a different set of digital marketing tools to ensure that every aspect of their business is optimised. For instance, some websites have well-optimised content, but fail on local SEO, link building and social media, while others may already have an excellent history of digital marketing, but have a website that fails to provide useful information or provide a functional call-to-action.

So, while this list of tips from the world’s leading SEOs is important, more important is knowing how and when to implement each of the different tasks. Our SEO consultants have decades of experience in optimising websites and helping businesses rank better. Contact us today to learn exactly how we will help your business grow.

Image source: Search Engine Journal.