Chances are your company/organization has a lot of valuable commodities beyond your website that can be put to good use to improve the quality and quantity of traffic you receive through search engine optimization efforts. We discuss some of these things in the subsections that follow.
If you have multiple domains, the major items to think about are:
Can you 301-redirect some of those domains back to your main domain or to a subfolder on the site for additional benefit?
Do you own exact keyword match domain names that would make for effective microsites?
If you’re maintaining those domains as separate sites, are you linking between them intelligently?
If any of those produce valuable strategies, pursue them—remember that it is often far easier to optimize what you’re already doing than to develop entirely new strategies, content, and processes. Particularly on the link-building side, this is some of the lowest hanging fruit around.
Partnerships can be leveraged in similar ways, particularly on the link-building front. If you have business partners that you supply or otherwise work with—or from whom you receive service—chances are good that you can implement link strategies between their sites and yours. Although reciprocal linking carries a bit of a bad reputation, there is nothing wrong with building a “partners,” “clients,” “suppliers,” or “recommended” list on your site, or with requesting that your organizational brethren do likewise for you. Just do this in moderation and make sure you link only to highly relevant, trusted sites.
Chances are that you have content that you never published on your website. This content can be immensely valuable to your SEO efforts. However, many companies are not savvy to the nuances of publishing that content in a manner that is friendly to search engines. Those hundreds of lengthy articles you published when you were shipping a print publication via the mail are a great fit for your website archives. You should take all of your email newsletters and make them accessible on your site. If you have unique data sets or written material, you should apply it to relevant pages on your site (or consider building out if nothing yet exists).
Customers are a terrific resource for earning links, but did you also know they can write? Customers and website visitors can contribute all kinds of content. Seriously, if you have user-generated content (UGC) options available to you and you see value in the content your users produce, by all means reach out to customers, visitors, and email list subscribers for both links and content opportunities.
This principle applies equally to generic enthusiasts of your work. For many businesses that operate offline or work in entertainment, hard goods, or any consumer services, chances are good that if your business is worth its salt, you’ve got people who’ve used your products or services and would love to share their experience. Do you make video games? Reach out to your raving fans. Written a book? Mobilize your literary customers on the Web. Organize events? Like customers, fans are terrific resources for link acquisition, content creation, positive testimonials, and social media marketing (to help spread the word).
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