With baseball in full swing, the soundtrack of the spring and summer will now be filled with the crack of a bat or the pop of the catcher’s glove after a 95 MPH fastball. As I was watching my beloved Mets play this weekend, I realized that the similarities between baseball and SEO are pretty striking. Whether it’s clichés, analogies, or strategies managers and players use during the course of the game or season, I realized they could be readily translated to the world of SEO.

Here are some crossovers from the baseball world we can use when thinking about overall SEO strategies and best practices:

• Pounding the strike zone. In baseball, this means that the main goal for pitchers is to throw as many strikes as they possibly can, and not mess around or nibble around the plate. For SEO, this means continuing to create quality content for the towns or areas you’re targeting. Continually creating quality content for the areas you target is essential to having a well-rounded SEO profile.

• Hit ‘em where they ain’t. You always want to hit the ball where the opposing fielders aren’t defending you. The same goes for SEO. Seek out areas where your competitors aren’t ranking or are lacking in terms of search optimization and take advantage. These areas also provide the best and fastest areas for SEO growth.

• Playing station to station. Search engine optimization is a process, one that can take months to see strong returns. With SEO, you’re not going to be able to swing for the fences since you need to steadily build quality content, links, and social shares to gain favor with search engines. By playing station to station, you’ll be able to slowly but surely win the battle for SEO supremacy.

• Don’t get caught looking. Nobody likes to strike out, especially strike out looking. It’s important to stay up to date with the latest SEO trends as well as how users are consuming content. Keeping up with the latest trends will ensure that you’re ahead of the curve, provide extra value to your campaign, and maintain a fresh perspective to your SEO strategy.

• Cut down on your swing. Everybody wants to rank all over the place when they first start doing SEO. The issue many SEOs run into is that they spread their resources too thin, whether it’s trying to target too many different areas or not targeting areas where you can make strong gains. Cutting down and keeping a simple approach will lead to more visibility and more impressions in the long run.

• Set the table. While creating great custom content and links is the key to your SEO strategy, you also need to “set the table” elsewhere. Setting your website up for success is imperative to making sure your quality content isn’t going to waste. This means correcting any 404 errors you have on site, having quality/realistic images on site, making sure your site is mobile-friendly/adaptive, maintaining quality back links to your site, cutting down on duplicate meta tags, and checking site load times, among others. Keeping your house in order is the best way to set up SEO success, since giving users a quality website experience is the key to building quality SEO and not just getting more clicks to your site that go nowhere.

Keeping these simple analogies in mind will not only help with a basic SEO strategy but will help you knock it out of the park in the long run.