Search engine optimization seems to be an issue that's on every small company owner's mind in today's digital economy. This is due to the fact that the majority of consumers utilise search engines like Google to identify the companies, goods, and services they most require, But how can you improve the outcomes of search engine optimization?
Your search engine ranking is influenced by a variety of things. Furthermore, raising your ranking is no simple feat.
1. Focus on UX
In June 2021, Google unveiled the latest official ranking change, Core Web Vitals. Google's main upgrades often concern the content. But this time, the focus is entirely on the user experience (UX).
Core Web Vitals are page experience signals that evaluate your site's user experience in three key areas:
- the website’s loading speed;
- stability;
- interactiveness and responsiveness.
Why is Google doing that?
Google aims to give its users the best engagement and experience possible across a variety of devices. In actuality, with Google switching to a 100% mobile-first index starting in March 2021, smartphone signals are the most significant.
2. Use Internal Linking
The significance of both internal and external links was previously discussed. Aside from that, we just utilised one!
Using relevant keywords, internal links assist connect different pages on your website. Because traffic isn't typically dispersed evenly across all pages, many pages end up being abandoned, this presents a significant potential for SEO.
To better understand how internal connections help rankings, Spencer Haws, for instance, conducted an experiment on his website. Without changing the text, adding internal links to 47 articles boosted the Google rankings for 76.6% of the posts. Really impressive, no?
3. Focus on Entity-Based SEO
Entity-based SEO is a phrase or term that can be utilised to contextually characterise your specialty. Entity-based SEO places an emphasis on broad subjects and ideas that let search engines deliver correct results right away.
Many words and phrases have more than one meaning. Look at the illustration below. The word "capri" refers to an Italian island, a popular juice called "Capri Sun," a type of slacks, and more!
So how can you expose your material to the correct audience?
Modern search engines are capable of understanding the meaning of users' queries because to their improved semantic search feature.
You must include the keyword pertinent to your niche for Google to grasp what your page is about. Including it in the title tag or the meta description is also acceptable.
As you want Google to add you to the high E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) knowledge graphs, this is also where internal links and domain authority come into play.
Why?
Because Google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources, and this goes beyond domain ratings. Essentially, the more expertise you have on the subject (in Google’s eyes), the better it is for your ranking.
4. Recreate Blog Posts as Videos
Video is remarkably the favorite content type among users. So, by converting your blog post into a video, you have a better chance to reach a bigger audience.
Research shows that publishers who utilize video content on their websites see 41% more traffic from search than those who only rely on written content. Moreover, video is also responsible for
Another suggestion is to use YouTube SEO, which works the opposite way from Google SEO. In order to rank as highly as possible on YouTube, your video needs to receive the most exposure in the first 24 hours, however on Google, an article can take the top spot after some time.
5. Get on Google Discover
Google Discover is a personalized AI-driven mobile news feed created by Google. It’s a type of query-less search with topics that resonate with users’ interests and previous search behavior.
Discover feed measures visitors’ engagement with the content. Therefore, if they like your content, the chances you’ll appear in their feed again are pretty high.
However, Google Discover doesn’t work equally well with all websites. According to the analysis of 11,000+ URLs, news websites received 99% of all clicks. Websites that fall into one of the following categories have also shown strong results:
- Sports & Entairnaiment
- E-Commerce
- Hobbies & Activities
To appear on Google Discover, high-quality, engaging content is a must.
Another tip to get the most traffic from Google Discover is to add Max Image Preview meta tag which essentially tells Google to display your article with a large image.
To do that, you’ll need to insert this tag in the HTML source code of your blog article either directly or through a plugin:
It should look like this:
Note that Discover content usually generates traffic only within the first 3 days, which means this tip should supplement your main SEO strategy.
6. Update Existing Content
It’s essential to keep the content as updated and fresh as possible. This is because search engines prioritize the most relevant (and recent) content for users.
- Update existing blog posts
Look at the image below. We updated our blog post about programmatic advertising industry trends on 11/11/2021. The spike on the graph shows how the traffic volume increased after the update.
However, don’t think that simply changing the publishing date on your old blog post will do the trick. It’s all about the content. So, when revisiting old articles, try to obtain the most up-to-date data and genuinely relevant information plus a keyword research
- Add original data to your content
If you can produce your own data-based content, such as infographics or charts, you’ll get more social shares and backlinks. For example, we used the Setupad reporting system data to demonstrate the eCPM change among 3 websites in our network in 2019-2020.
- Update the images
Imagine you’re updating an article from 2015 with a screenshot of the Instagram interface from that year. It immediately feels like very old content, even if the information there is still relevant.
- Run a page-level content gap analysis
This can be used to find and add missing topics to your existing content.
For example, we run a page-level content gap analysis in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer for our blog post about 4 types of programmatic deals against the top pages for our target keyword.
We found that it doesn’t rank for at least 3 keywords with decent traffic volume and low KD (keyword difficulty).
This tells us that once we add the missing information to our blog post, we’ll most likely start ranking for these keywords and make our content more in-depth.
