SEO techniques change rapidly. And they often change without you even realizing it. Techniques that had helped you get on the front page in 2018 or even 2019 are useless now and may even be hurting your website’s ranking. Hence you need to be at the top of your game when it comes to SEO, otherwise, you may fall behind while your competitors march right past you.
People use Google to perform over 3.5 billion searches in a day. 78% of the people look for a product or service online for ratings before they take the plunge to buy it. If your website ranks on the first page of Google’s search results, it increases your visibility. This leads to increased traffic and conversions revenue. 75% of the users do not look past the first page.
It goes without saying that in order to improve visibility, your website needs to be present on the front page. So, what can you do to increase the traffic on your website?
SEO experts take certain measures and adopt techniques that increase visibility and lands more viewers on your websites. Higher rankings equal more organic traffic, and it boosts the overall ROI.
Here are nine of the most effective and advanced techniques employed by SEO experts to increase site rankings and visibility:
1. Offer A Good User Experience on Your Website
Google wants to show the best results for any user’s query. And if users leave a website very quickly without exploring it, Google will keep such websites out of the way as it does not want to display low-quality results to its users.
So, you want to improve the outlook and interface of your website first. It needs to look like a high-quality website with the right content where the user is not left guessing the reliability of the information provided on it.
People do not want to land on a shady site that takes forever to load and has errors and broken links. Issues like these lead to a high bounce rate and Google rewards sites that have a very low bounce rate along with higher page ranking.
It reasons that a user would only spend time on a page that they find useful. Even if it’s a page that they weren’t looking for, if the website layout is decent, users will go through the site to see if there’s anything on it that could be useful for later.
2. Here is how you can reduce the bounce rate of your website:
Easy to read posts: A lot of websites format their content for the web. It means the usage of shorter paragraphs, mixed sentence length, subheadings for posts, bullet points, and the use of images and white space.
It goes without saying that the most important thing in addition to the previous list is ’Quality Content’. If the content is not of good quality, no number of images or fonts or anything can make it readable. The content needs to be related to the website and provide the reader with easy to understand language. The content also needs to be in accordance with the user’s reading level.
Bucket Brigades: It is a copywriting technique that captures a reader’s interest and keeps them reading until the end of your page. It essentially is the breaking down of ideas into multiple sentences with the use of trigger words and ending sentences with colons in order to pique interest.
Some trigger phrases that can be used are: The answer is:, Here’s the deal:, You may be wondering:
Inverted Pyramid Style: Journalists are taught the pyramid style of writing during their courses. According to this method, the most important information goes on top, i.e. - the ‘who, what, why, when, where, and how’ of a piece of information. That is followed by the slightly lesser details about the article and is ended by background or general information. Readers tend to scan the start of the article and rarely make it to the end of the page.
3. Topic Clusters in Place of Keywords
Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving and learning from its environment. It is now trying to understand the intention of the users, what they expect, and what they’re looking for, and more specifically, what kind of search results would answer their queries. This is where the ‘snippet box’ becomes useful’.
Websites do not end up on the first page of Google’s search results by simply having keyword-focused content. There needs to be context surrounding the keywords. Content needs to be built keeping in mind the ‘user intent’. There are 2 things to consider:
Target Audience: The type of content you create is entirely dependent on your audience. You need to know your audience in order to know the kind of content they would enjoy or be interested in.
Organizing Content into Clusters: Words can be organized in clusters instead of focusing on stand-alone words. It helps reach the audience better as users tend to search for content using detailed phrases instead of singular words.
4. Longer Content = Higher Ranking
A study by Backlinko suggests that longer content has a higher likelihood of being ranked at the top. It is impossible for every blog to have more than 2000 words on every post. It is a time-consuming process.
While it may be necessary in some cases, users may not always be looking for lengthy blog posts. For example, if someone searches for the phrase ‘baking a cake’, it would mean that they’re looking for simple instructions on how to bake a cake.
But if the query is something like ‘baking a cake: do’s and don’ts’, they may be looking for a more detailed content that explains the entire process and highlights what to do and what to avoid. There is no sure way to know the length of the content required. Just make sure that your content offers comprehensive answers to what users are searching for.
5. Variety of Backlinks
Backlinks are very important in SEO. Google reports that links are the number one factor when it comes to deciding the search rank because for them, “ranking without links is really, really hard.” It doesn’t mean that any link is a good link. Low-quality links do not work anymore and can harm your site in return. Links earned through outreach, influencer marketing, and high-quality content is effective and safe for your website.
6. Update Older Content
If your website has been in use for more than six months, you need to update all the data available on your website and keep it fresh and trending. Previous posts can be updated and leveraged for higher search rankings. Your top-ranking content can be identified and modified to keep it trending and fresh. Get into Details When Relevant
By 2021, 50 percent of all searches are going to be conducted by voice. Even now, a lot of people use voice-assisted programs to help them navigate the web. Voice searchers differ from those who type in their queries and this factor needs to be taken into account when optimizing SEO for any particular site. For example, a texter might type in ‘dog diet’ but a voice searcher might search for the phrase ‘what do dogs eat?’
7. Target Local Searchers
Almost 45 percent of the searches on Google are from local users who are looking for information. They look for information like opening hours, local stores, telephone numbers, and addresses. Stores that operate as brick and mortar stores need to have their information listed online and SEO optimized in order to stay profitable. This can be done in the following ways:
You can double-check your directory listings. Search engines like Google and Bing are powerful and rely on additional information from local sources.
Your page can be optimized to have local information in order to show up first on Google’s search page. Create your own site and SEO optimizes it keeping local searches in mind.
8. Video Content Are Turning Out as The New Content King
Content is King. Everyone is aware of that. Along with written content, video content is also gaining popularity among internet users. According to a research, video-sharing platform, YouTube has become the second largest search engine. Besides, people, on average, are consuming one billion hours of video content on YouTube every day.
Adding video content can increase dwell time on your website. Additionally, they take up a lot of space in the search engine results pages. Even Google SERPs have given much importance to videos and nearly doubled their occurrence in their results page.
Videos are an amazing way to boost user engagement. Hence, trying to include video content in your posts, landing pages, and sites can go a long way in better ranking your business. Given below are a few tips that you can implement in your content strategy to make your audience love your content.
Start by including short brand videos and product demos in your website and posts.
You can also create videos with the aim to educate your users about your products and services.
Webinars, interviews, or other live broadcasts can work wonders to improve user engagement.
Make sure to add appropriate metadata and transcripts for your videos. Try to use short and crisp titles along with rich descriptions regarding the content of the video. This will help Google to have a better understanding of the intent.
Go for exact keyword matching or at least a closer variant of the keyword. YouTube follows this as well.
Add keyword tags for your videos, so that they can be put under recommended videos for your users according to their intent.
Don’t limit yourself to adding video content to only YouTube or blog posts. You can also upload them to Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, and many other popular platforms.
Submit a video sitemap to search engines.
Note: ‘How-to’ videos are extremely popular and their demand for YouTube is growing by seventy percent every year.
9. Leverage Google My Business Listing to Your Business Advantage
Google is focusing on improving its local search. In pursuit of that, it is making new and better additions to its Google My Business (GMB). GMB works very well to improve the visibility of your website or business.
Some of the main ranking factors in GMB are Google posts, images, Q&As and reviews. Here are a few tips to optimize your business for GMB signals.
As you publish on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you need to do the same for Google posts as well.
Try to make your ‘call to actions’ as engaging as possible to encourage conversations on your posts.
You can also add your own questions and answers to Google Q&As. This will tie up branded content back to your business.
Your GMB listing needs to have images as well. Periodically check and update them. Now, you can also add videos.
As new features are being constantly added to GMB, you have to log in to your profile at regular times and fill up any empty fields that you find.
Your reputation precedes you. Use Google Reviews to build your business reputation and relevance. To do that you can request your customers to write a review about any service and product that they liked. Remember to reply to them always.
Final Thoughts
There a number of other ways to increase your ranking on Google. However, these are the easiest ways through which viewership of the site can be increased.
As we move forward with new market demands and innovations, it is possible that video content and news forms of content may turn out to be more important than ever before. Don’t worry about written content. It will have its place and significance too.
Whatever the new time or future brings, it is crucial to stick to the basics of SEO. The tried-and-true methods of SEO are never going to be obsolete; they might instead act as the foundation for laying out new techniques and solutions. Therefore, try not to get carried away with the latest SEO craze and neglect the industry best practices.
Having said that, don’t hold yourself back from approaching the problems with a newer angle. You never know, maybe you will be the one to set new SEO trends in the future.
Author BioName: Pramendra SinghPramendra singh is an SEO analyst and a learner with a curious mind to learn about a wide range of SEO topics. His experience in SEO and writing and reviewing content gives him a solid base to approach several subjects that are valuable for businesses and websites looking to build a strong presence in the market.
When he is not writing, you can find him enjoying and playing music. Reach him at digirock17@gmail.com.
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