Thing is, most (if not all) digital marketing strategies revolve around making effective use of search engine optimisation. This idea in itself can be overwhelming, especially if you have to use a lot of digital marketing channels and strategies.

After all, not everyone has the time to study everything there is to know with SEO, right? This is true, but what if there are actually SEO strategies we can apply to almost every digital marketing campaign out there?

There are some universal SEO strategies that can help give anyone an edge in whatever marketing campaign that they want to pull off.

The key here is to understand how and why these concepts are important, and then applying them to campaigns. Here are three of these strategies:

1. Find out if your website is optimised for SEO

One of the most important cornerstones of SEO for your brand would be your website. This serves as your brand's digital 'avatar' in cyberspace, and this will be the image everyone sees whenever they interact with your company.

If we want audiences to be converted into leads, and eventually customers, we have to make sure our website is built for reader interaction and customer satisfaction.

This is all the more important, considering South Africa alone has 31.18 million internet users. If your website is optimised for SEO, you'll likely get a huge readership with your South African audiences. It could be much larger if you manage to optimise your SEO enough for a global audience.

Interestingly enough, making our website as friendly to viewers as possible actually optimises it for SEO. Make sure your website content is compressed to speed things up.

Slow websites hurt your SEO, not because it might take longer for search engines to crawl through your content, but because a slow website isn't useful for readers.

Every second it takes for your site to load, the higher the chances for your readers to go to other websites. To avoid this, you need to make sure your content is in a compressed format.

This speeds up your website and ensures everything you have to offer your readers can be accessed properly.

2. Prioritise building great UI and UX for your readers

Aside from compressed assets, you have to make sure that you provide great user experience in your website. You do this through great user interfaces, as well as meaningful and responsive website design.

Elements of your website, from your appearance, down to the placement of icons and text, must help make your readers have an easier time navigating and checking out your content.

Provide ample white space so your readers' eyes can get rest. Your website features must be easily accessible.

Mobile-optimisation is key to a wider audience. Most internet users today likely have mobile devices and more purchases are actually made from tablets and other gadgets compared to desktops.

In South Africa alone, there 28.99 million mobile users, meaning that a website that is not optimised for mobile can lose a lot of potential audiences and leads.

And considering how people are spending more time with their mobile devices, you need to make sure your branding and your content are fit for mobile devices.

When you release your website, make sure it loads perfectly on mobile, and that all the features it has on the desktop can be accessed appropriately on mobile devices.

3. Always do link building with relevant and related websites

A huge part of your SEO efforts focuses not just on your content releases, but with what other brands you establish connections with.

We're talking about link building — as in the marketing strategy that involves optimising your content to make it attractive enough for other websites to pick up and link back to.

Ideally, we want to just release great content and wait for others to link back to us. However, some of us engage actively in link exchange and guest posting, which means we regularly interact with other brands.

When we do this, make sure we build networks and guest posts with blogs that are actually related to our niche and what we release.

When we decide to do link exchange and guest posts with other brands and blogs, we need to make sure they're reputable in the industry.

While the goal is to be the go-to website in our particular niche, we want to make sure we're also associated with other relevant brands that talk about the topics we discuss.

This way, we piggy-back not just on their readership, but also their search engine score. When these websites link back to us, we get a much-needed boost in how they're perceived by search engines.

Links should be organic and natural. This link building principle is called organic link building, where we 'build' our reputation online by natural backlinks that other brands and companies use to refer to the content we make.

OrganicLinkBuilders.com, a digital marketing service provider for example, specialises in organic link building as it's a natural way to get backlinks.

And unlike strategies that involve just paying sites to publish our guest posts (which can impact your SEO score), we want to make content and encourage sites to publish our content because it has a natural and organic relationship with their niche.

Apply link building strategies to content creation. When we make content, we need to make sure we reference content significant to our topic and our niche.

When we link out, we generate 'trackable' traffic, making us a potential authority in our niche. If we link back to relevant websites and brands, we raise our appeal to search engines as a reliable website.

However, if we choose to link to unrelated websites, we end up risking our score.

Think about your customers first and your search engines second. Contrary to what we think, we shouldn’t write content solely based on what our search engines may 'want' to see.

Today, thanks to more advanced algorithms such as Google’s BERT, search engines are becoming more capable of understanding and processing language. This means content in the future will focus on context instead of purely keywords.

Stop writing content based on keywords. 92.42-percent of keywords actually just get ten or lower monthly searches. We need to find words, concepts and topics related to our target keywords and also focus on making relevant content for those.

The point here is that our content needs to provide more value to the keyword and not just condense it with the same topics and different angles of the same topic. Create content that your readers actually need. 

*Image courtesy of Pixabay