White-hat SEO refers to search engine optimization practices allowed and encouraged by Google and other search engines. By nature, it’s considered the opposite of black hat SEO, which uses strategies and tactics that go against Google’s guidelines.
If you’re trying to build a long-term brand in your industry, all of your SEO efforts must be white hat. I.e, you prioritize the user over anything else.
White hat SEO is important because it helps drive quality search traffic and protect your rankings to scale and grow organic search traffic. Unfortunately, some specific industries, such as payday loans or gambling, choose to use black hat SEO techniques despite the risk.
SEOs in these industries understand they can lose all search traffic overnight if there’s an algorithm update or Google hits them with a manual action. However, they’re always ready to launch a new website if this happens.
White hat SEO presumes to work on one website instead of many. The goal is to create the best content for users, not search engines. As a result, you can provide the best experience for your visitors through great design, structure, and copy.
With white hat SEO, all content marketing and SEO efforts scale the website traffic year over year. On the contrary, black hat SEO uses a quantity-over-quality approach to try and scale as quickly as possible without focusing on the UX.
It’s easy to quickly fill your website by stealing, copying, or producing computer-generated content. But this type of content doesn’t give your website any strong foundation. To ensure you’re always creating unique and valuable content, you should use the concept of 10x content.
The idea is that your content should be ten times as good as the content already ranking for a given keyword or topic. This concept is important because it encourages creators to focus on quality and reader experience rather than just SEO.
When you use the 10x content strategy, your goal goes beyond just ranking and focusing on better content than what’s already on Google. As a result, your content leaves a positive impression on readers and encourages them to return to your site.
Most website owners still learning the ropes of SEO are afraid that every link-building strategy or tactic is against Google’s guidelines. For example, you might have heard that Google is against guest posting or link exchanges.
However, according to Google’s Spam Policies, only excessive link exchanges and overoptimized links in guest articles are considered link spam. There’s nothing wrong with occasional guest posts and exchanging links with a mutually beneficial partnership.
Of course, white hat SEO doesn’t use a paid link strategy. Instead, it focuses on creating quality content that organically generates links because it’s content worth referencing.
Search intent is the why behind a search query. Search intent matters because Google aims to provide users with the most relevant search results. There are four types of search intent that you can infer based on keyword modifiers, such as how, what, why, and where.
However, it’s not as simple as looking for a particular word to understand the intent. So, to ensure your content has a clear search intent, it should align with the content type, format, and angle in the search results.
To help you start your content creation process, take cues from the search results and top-ranking pages. That’s the only way to truly understand what people want to see what your content should deliver.
Grey hat SEO combines black hat and white hat SEO strategies. For example, creating quality content and using PBNs.
If your white hat approach to SEO isn’t working, it could be a mixture of factors. It’s best to review your SEO goals, the keywords you’re trying to target, the function of your website, and your content. These are all things that could be impacting your ability to rank.
And you should remember that in SEO, especially in white-hat SEO, it can take many months before you see the results.