The ultimate purpose of a website or blog is to increase traffic and eventually, sales. And the strategy that makes this possible is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Companies desire to rank higher on search engines for the same reason. However, in the year 2022, getting high SEO rankings has become all the more challenging than earlier. While many think that it is impossible to rank higher through a strategy, it is not. It might be a little difficult, but not impossible.
1. Shift focus on Relevant Things
All those companies complaining about low SEO rankings, in spite of adopting a thousand tricks, should now focus on only the important. To put it in another way, they should stop focusing on all those things that do not matter. There is so much content available already on the world wide web. Only some things of all these matters.
The fact is that amid the noise, the sound is lost. There is so much noise about unimportant stuff that the required relevant stuff is missed altogether. People waste their time executing SEO strategies that do not help at all. Some of the inconsequential things are:
Yoast
Many are concerned with getting green lights in Yoast. However, there are no benefits of the same, nor there are drawbacks. If you do not have much time on hand, then stop wasting energy on it.
Domain
Instead of wasting time searching for fancy domain names, it is required that companies opt for the exact-match domains. This might seem like a piece of old and much-propagated advice, but this is very important and beneficial. Choosing a memorable domain name gives your brand an edge.
LSI keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing refers to related words and phrases. Many people resort to a common SEO strategy wherein LSI words are used in the content. However, this is a myth. Google does not use LSI and focussing on it is a complete waste of time, effort and energy.
Long-form content
It is a myth that writing long-form content will help boost SEO rankings. Long-form content might be a dampener. Instead of focusing on the number of words, writers should focus on how much content will help settle the curiosity of the readers.
Social signals
Social signals do not influence the SEO rankings of your website directly. A piece of content becomes popular on social media platforms because it is interesting. This is the reason the page has good SEO rankings. If the content is not good, it will not be popular on social media as well, right?
2. Learn the Game of Backlinks
Did you know that backlinks are among the top three factors that aid SEO rankings? There is a direct relationship between the referring domains of the page and the resulting organic search traffic. However, do not go overboard with backlinks. While backlinks help, thousands of them are not required to boost traffic. The important factor is the competitiveness of the topic. In the present age, it has become simple to hire freelancers to invite backlinks from trusted sites.
High-quality backlinks are important
If the topic is very competitive and already has a lot of content on the same, then writing on that topic will require a number of backlinks to be visible. With just 9-10 backlinks, such content will not be visible on the first page of the search engine. In order to climb the ranking ladder in search engines, getting high-quality backlinks is very important. A few good backlinks can make a huge difference to the rankings of your content.
Time to upgrade the backlinks of images
If your content sports custom illustrations, infographics, or unique images, then it is time to embed these visuals in the content. Such content usually links back to the image source. There are chances that such content links to the image files, however. While it is not ideal from the point of view of SEO. The best thing is that the link points to the source page rather than the image file.
Boost the rankings of substantial pages
Internal links refer to links from one page on your webpage to another webpage of your website. Such links are quite crucial as they help your visitors visit another webpage on your website. Further, it even helps in distributing PageRank around your website. And even search engines like Google get to understand your content through such links.
Remove backlinks from dead pages
It is time that dead pages with backlinks are fixed. This is because backlinks that lead to dead pages are a waste. They do not help the rankings of the page as they no longer exist. Further, such pages do not even help other pages as well. Hence, it is required that dead pages consisting of backlinks should be fixed at regular intervals. Dead pages should be redirected to other places where they can be useful.
3. Make the content interesting and engaging
The sure-shot strategy to improve SEO rankings on Google is to focus on the content. Moreover, you can hire a SEO Expert that can help you improve your rankings. The ultimate hack is to make the content interesting and engaging. If the content does not make sense, any number of strategies will not be helpful at all. The next step is to refresh the content that is no longer relevant or is declining.
It is required that you refresh declining content. If you think that the organic traffic of your site was immensely popular recently and you can ignore this hack, then you are wrong. Even if your website is popular, there might be some pages that are declined. There is no reason to get disheartened, however. Because the fact is that rankings do not last forever. Refreshing and republishing content that has begun declining is very important.
In order to search for declining content, you can make use of Google Search Console. For this, you need to go to the report of the Search Results. Then, filter the date and select compare. You need to compare the last six months to the period prior to that. Select Pages Tab and sort the results based on low to high. Your task is to search for pages that are probably dependent on freshness. Some pages lose their value since they were last published.
Further, make sure that your webpage is aligned with the intent of the search. Refresh the content and add subtopics that might have become popular now. If your content does not pacify the curiosity of the searchers or answer their queries, then it is completely pointless. Also, while writing content, always give importance to search intent. If you desire to rank high on Google, then you should create content, keeping search intent in mind. Align the content of your page with search intent.
4. Include things that make content relevant
Your content needs to be rich and engaging. Viewers should find it relevant and interesting. However, there are certain things that will help attract readers to your content which is otherwise impossible, given the number of pages sharing content on the same topic.
FAQs
Content on the webpage revolves around a specific topic. While it is inclusive and covers almost all the topics, it is difficult to include all the questions that the readers might have. Hence it is important to answer questions that are beyond the narrative of the post. If your content does not answer certain questions, then you might miss out the traffic generated through long-tail content.
The best strategy to tap on this traffic is to answer all possible and relevant questions that are not answered. Such questions can be answered by including a section titled FAQs at the end of the post. Related questions can be searched through keyword explorer and answered below the main content. So, when people search for the answers, your webpage (that answers the question) ultimately ranks high in Google. When FAQs are marked with structured data, the webpage becomes eligible for rich result.
Expert Quotes
While you might know everything about a specific topic, there are other people who are considered experts in such topics. Quoting them helps boost the SEO rankings of your webpage. According to Google representatives, quoting experts is not a direct factor that improves rankings, however, it is one of the signs that helps match the content to expertise, trust and authoritativeness.
When experts are quoted in your content, the chances of it getting shared on social media platforms increases to a considerable extent. To improve the chances of content getting shared, ask the followers to do the same. When the content gets shared, probabilities of it leading to backlinks increases a lot.
Mixed-intent keywords
While some people search for content through exact keywords, others do not look for exactly the same thing. When search results are a mix of lists, definitions, and even guides, then the keywords typed are mixed intent keywords. The search results are based on the fact that while some searchers want to know about the definition, others might want to know about the guide for the same. If your content does not rank for mixed intent keyword, then it is imperative to create content for the intent that is dominant.
5. Tricks that you should not miss
The tricks mentioned above are very important to boost the rankings of your webpage in the search engine. Some of the strategies that will play an important role in acing the SEO of your website or blog are:
Title tags
Recently, Google revised the rules for generating webpage titles in its search results. While earlier, it relied more on title tags, Google now focuses more on content on the pages. Google is likely to rewrites title tags. This means that the title that the search engine shows is exactly the same as the title tag of the page, most of the times. For this reason, if you are willing to attract people to your website through search results, then it iis necessary to craft irresistible title tags.
Page experience signals
Core web vitals help measure the user experience. They are the speed metrics that are used for measuring ux viz. Visual stability, interactivity, and even visual load. If you desire to know whether the core web vitals of your web page need to be worked upon, then you can use the core web vitals report in the Google search console. Alternatively, you can check the performance report.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets refer to the excerpts that belong to the top-ranking pages. These are the excerpts that are exhibited in the search results. It is possible to take a shortcut to the number #1 position, if you are able to bag the prize of featured snippet for your high-volume term. This helps in increasing organic traffic on your page. While featured snippets are difficult to win, some of them are quite easier to gain. For this, you need to prioritize opportunities that are low-hanging.
In the end
While above mentioned hacks are quite important to boost the SEO rankings of your webpage, it is also necessary to audit your content on an annual basis. Through content audit, it is necessary to analyze your webpages to check whether they perform as intended. Post this step, you need to take a call whether your webpages requires to be updated, consolidated or even deleted if they are not performing well.
You might want to apply all the hacks to rank high in the search engines. But sometimes, too many cooks can spoil the broth. Hence, you just need to execute one or two SEO hacks and do it whole-heartedly. In order to succeed with SEO for your webpage, you can start small and expand your reach gradually.
All said and done, it is very important to focus your effort and energy on building real relationships with the audience. When this is not done, SEO becomes a waste of time. When you concentrate on the real relationships, then you need not apply hacks to increase the traffic, it is boosted automatically.
