SEO is a digital marketing tactic that most markets will be familiar with. And why not? In this age of breakneck competition and huge promotion budgets, it offers the hope of providing credible visibility and web traffic, without having to make heavy spends. However, optimising a website in a way that makes it rank high well into the future requires continuous and sustained efforts for it to give results. This is due to the ever-changing algorithms and updates, and the changing landscape of online competition.
So, is there any way to ensure sustained SEO success?
As a successful, multi-national digital marketing agency, we are of the firm belief that research and experience are the best teachers. And through our journey of helping brands scale SERP success, we’ve learnt to include proactive practices that can help sustain a good ranking over time:
Strategic Keyword Optimisation
The most basic practice to get your website ranking is to add relevant keywords. While adding the right keywords is essential, knowing how many times to use them and where is equally so.Ideally, it is recommended to add the keyword at least once in the title tag of the page, once in the URL of the website, and, most importantly, in the body of your content right in the first 100 words.
Further, while Google Suggest is an ideal avenue to find long tail keywords, other platforms like YouTube, Wikipedia, and even search engines like Bing offer equally effective results.
Coining your own brand keywords are yet another way to rank for them on search engines. All you need is a strategy, and a dedicated process and approach.
Prioritising Quality Content
For those unaware of what pogo-sticking is, the term is used to describe a situation where a user has landed on your page and goes right back out to find something they would find more useful. The bottom line is that your audience pogo-sticking out of your website is a clear indication that your website has no quality content to offer. Search engines count pogo-sticking as a factor while ranking websites, which can cost your site a high rank in the search listings unless you optimise your site and add quality to it.
Regular Optimisation of Your Website
Optimising your website overall includes a number of things, from refurbishing old content and checking the loading speed of the page to pruning your site of all the dead pages causing your site to rank lower. Delete all third-party scripts that are non-essential and cause your page to load slower. Upgrade your old content by adding external links, editing the title, creating a checklist, and more. Additionally, make sure you add texts to images, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more to link them to your website.
Never forget – for search engines, one well-optimised page is much better than a hundred zombie pages.
Gleaning Backlinks from Visual Content
Any unique visual content you upload on your site, whether it is an infographic or image, which is later used by other websites can help you get backlinks that improve your ranking. Even if these websites have not readily linked back to your site, you can simply send across a friendly email requesting a backlink to the original site.
Featured Snippet Optimisation
Ranking as a featured snippet is something every brand or business wants. Where many had to earlier guess what their content needed to rank, certain tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and more made it easy for businesses to optimise their content just right with their Featured Snippet research.These studies involved analysing millions of keywords and featured snippets. One of the findings showed that adding Q&A to your content works wonders in getting it ranked as a featured snippet.
This just goes to show how a little research can make a world of a difference when it comes to having your site rank higher in the long run.
Utilising Features Like the Google Search Console
A lot of the features and tools provided by Google have gone unused because many fail to understand their potential in making websites rank high. Google Console is just one among many features that you can make use of to increase the potential of your website.
Once you have logged in to Google Search Console, take a look at the ‘Performance Report’ segment where you can find out how each of your page performs and the keywords they rank for. Oftentimes, you can even come across keywords you never knew you could rank for.
Further, taking advantage of the many Google updates is yet another tactic to explore.
As we’ve said earlier, a lot can be done using keywords. And when we say keywords, using their synonyms is equally vital. With the Google Hummingbird update, it has become possible for search engines to look beyond keywords and actually understand the gist of your topic.
A great way to optimise the content on your site for Hummingbird is to add multiple variations of the keyword by scrolling through your search results for more relevant search queries. Checking the ‘related searches’ section can also be very helpful in optimising for Google Hummingbird.
Exploring Shoulder Niches
Creating interesting content for most industries and niches takes a great deal of creativity. Often, in some niche industries, the audience may find the content too uninspiring to share itor revisit it. What makes situations like these challenging is your ability to use a shoulder niche to boost traffic for your website.
Shoulder niche is nothing but a topic that is closely related to, or relevant to a great extent to, your own niche. In essence, shoulder niche acts as an add-on to your own niche, giving you a wider range of topics to cover while still integrating your niche into the content.
An example of this would be having ‘cleaning supplies’ as your niche but using a shoulder niche like ‘organising cabinets. Here, you can not only cover topics like ‘Choosing the Right Cleaning Supplies’ but also create shoulder niche content with topicssuch as ‘How Organising Cabinets Make Cleaning Supplies More Accessible’ or ‘The Trick to Keeping your Organising Cabinets Dust-Free’.
Summing Up
Proactively engaging in SEO practices can help you gain a better understanding wherein you, as a website owner, can identify the best strategies that work for your business. Further, keeping abreast of the changing search engine algorithms is a sure way to navigate optimising your website for higher ranking even in the long run.
Article By,
Mr.Zuber Sheikh,
Managing Director, Rank My Business
