In this modern age of digital marketing, it’s crucial for you to update your techniques and strategies in order to stay afloat. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those strategies that you need to improve continually. With an average of 80% of a website’s traffic reliant on search queries, your brand must be not only visible on search engines but also rank high, and SEO will help you do that.
Better visibility means more traffic, conversions, and eventually, revenue for your business. However, modern SEO techniques aren’t just caring about what search engines think of your brand; in addition, Google also updates its algorithm, so SEO techniques also need to keep evolving.
You need to find the proper SEO approach for your business, and here are a few for your consideration:
1. Write compelling title, heading, and meta tags
The title of your content should always be compelling enough for readers to click on it—increasing organic clickthrough rate (CTR) is one of the many ways your page can increase its ranking. If you want some suggestions on how to make your title, heading, and description irresistible to readers, look no further than ad copy.
Understandably, ads should also be enticing for its audience. Other than that, Google Adwords ads are also a good source for your title, heading, and meta tag ideas because they have been tested for effectiveness in maximizing clicks. Look for ads with an engaging copy for competitive keywords that you can incorporate into your title and meta tag.
2. Aim for authority sites
Backlinks, usually gathered from your link building strategy, remain as a leading ranking factor. However, you first have to be sure that you’re getting quality links so your site can rank higher. The best way to do this is to source links from authoritative sites. Backlinks from sites that have high domain and page authority help your overall trustworthiness.
You can use Alltop to find sites that you can link to. Once you have these sites, you can link the page to your content as a data source, or communicate with them and ask to link back to your content.
3. Use long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords help reach your niche because they tend to be highly specific, but there are other reasons to utilize long keywords or phrases.
- To target a geographic location: You can be more descriptive with your title and meta description by targeting a geographical area. This can improve your local search visibility and reach those customers who may be doing a local search—for example, using “pizza delivery in Brooklyn” instead of just “pizza delivery.”
- To target a period of time: You can also be more specific about time, especially when publishing posts that you can keep on updating. This allows you to inform readers and search engines that the content is relevant and up-to-date (i.e. “Content Marketing Trends [Updated for 2019]. Plus, you can do this every year.\
Using long-tail keywords (perhaps a combination of two keywords) on your title can also help you rank faster, as opposed to using just one term. This will increase your chances of search engine visibility because you are not aiming for bottleneck keywords.
4. Maximize local directories
A study found that around 46% of Google searches are from users looking for local information, or business near them. Details such as telephone number, address, or opening hours are important for them. Therefore, you should aim to be searchable for users who may need your products and services.
You can easily do this by including contact details and directions to your location on the website. But, another thing you can do is to submit your business to directories like Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yahoo Local Listing, and many other local directories. You may also consider the following:
- Local Data Aggregators: These services can help you build your directory listings. Something like Bright Local will save you the trouble of painstakingly re-entering the same information over and over again and avoid errors.
- Local Directory Management Service: These are services like Moz Local and Yext, which scan local directories, interact with data aggregators, and correct old information.
- Schema: Schema is snippets of additional information to search users and search engines about a business. It doesn’t require extra coding and can be inserted by using Google’s Schema markup generator. Schema can give local searchers details like the company’s hours, location, general information, and more without having to visit their page.
5. Fix other site’s broken links
Here’s a quite nifty way to optimize your site: do outreach and recommend your content to publishers as a reference in order to fix their broken links or improve their content’s reliability. One website where you can do this is Wikipedia. Some professionals may find it not that reliable as a reference, and its links are technically no-follow, but it undoubtedly has high domain authority and trust level from Google.
There are two types of links you can take advantage here: citation neededor information that requires a source, and dead links or details that previously link to its original source but the source has since been taken down for some reason.
You can use a tool called WikiGrabber to get a list of Wikipedia articles that need citations or have dead links, or you can also just Google it by using the search term, site:wikipedia.org “Keyword/phrase” “dead link.” You can then write a post about the topic you found and cite it as the source to get valuable links from Wikipedia.
6. Be mobile-friendly
Outside of content, optimization also relies on your mobile web design. In May 2016, Google updated its algorithm to prioritize mobile indexing. It significantly boosted organic search rankings for websites that are optimized for mobile; therefore, having responsive mobile web design became an SEO ranking factor. This is because most searches, or over 60%, are currently being done on mobile every day.
Responsive design is where desktop webpages can still be viewed in a display or web browser that is different in size from that of a standard desktop. This means that a website must offer the same support to a variety of devices.
WordPress already has mobile-friendly themes built with HTML5. If you want to be sure that your website is already optimized for other devices, you can use Google’s free Mobile Testing Tool.
Going Beyond Search Engines
These SEO techniques may be quite complicated compared to your basic keyword research and link building, but they are incredibly effective. You need to be always on the lookout for new tactics to implement, especially considering Google’s frequent algorithm changes and webmaster guidelines edits. You have to be flexible and adapt quickly to give your business an edge against the competition.
Aside from that, remember that your audience is human—you’re merely not doing SEO for search engines. Focus on user experience and intent when coming up with your own strategies. Try and experiment with these techniques, as well as others that you may find, and reap the benefits of taking risks.