Content creation is still the most effective SEO tactic but also the most difficult

Chart of the day: Marketers are finding the difficulty of external/internal linking  and web page load speed outstrips the effectiveness

In the November 2016 Search Engine Optimization Survey from Ascend2, they found that 57% of the 256 respondents understood that relevant content creation was the most effective tactics to boost their SEO traffic but at the same time it was also the most difficult. I'd suggest that this is mostly due it being time-consuming for marketers to create great content but also the competition to make it unique is high when it seems like everyone is doing inbound marketing.

Interestingly, the two tactics that were marked are more difficult than effective were external linking and web page load speed. Generating links to your site is hard and requires dedication from everyone in the marketing team to create high-quality engaging content that other site/bloggers will want to publish for their followers and give you that all important link. Web page load speed on the other hand, is a careful balance of working with your web devs to streamline the code base as well as being prudent with the technology you add to the site, I'm sure most of you will have at least 5 maybe ten+ technologies tagged to your site that can slow your site down to a crawl.

• Source: Ascend2
• Sample: 256 marketing influencers
• Recommended Resource: Search engine optimisation Toolkit