SEO is a great tool used by companies to market their products so that they can increase their revenue. Most successful companies use SEO to reach out to their customers online.
In today’s world, where competition among companies is tough, you should absolutely lean on SEO to gain an advantage over your online competitors.
As many businesses use this technique, questions arise as to how to increase SEO ranking with the objective of attracting more customers, since most people only look at two or three links on the SERPs.
Since it is important to improve your rankings on search engines, let’s look at some tips to get you started:
Use Preemptive SEO
Digital marketers use different techniques to achieve their SEO goals.
All too often, they focus on keywords with high search volume. Unfortunately, those keywords are also very competitive to rank for.
As a result, they miss the opportunity to get high on the ranking.
Preemptive SEO helps to solve this problem by targeting a new niche or keyword cluster before the space gets too crowded over time.
So the best technique is to start on the niche before it gets too trendy. Remember to use hashtag/keywords which make your post among the top and trending posts in that category.
As time passes, your content will earn more exposure, which will in turn increase its ranking.
Content Clustering
Search engines keep altering their algorithms. Instead of focusing only on keywords, they are now interested in clusters of content on specific topics (Semantic SEO).
Due to this evolution in indexing and ranking, marketers need to build content that creates clusters around pillars (topics) in their category.
These pillars are pages which describe a topic, for example,” Clothing.”
The clusters around this pillar place emphasis on keywords (long coats, jeans, tank tops, shorts and so on).
The pillars link to each one of these cluster pages, and they link back to the pillar with the same keyword.
This means that when a single page performs well, the entire cluster improves.
Topic cluster send signals to a search engine that help your business rise to the top.
Use Internal Links and Backlinks
Internal links point from one page on your domain to another page on the same website.
They are extremely useful for creating site architecture and expanding link equity past the home page to other internal pages.
A search engine needs to see the content to index it all.
Thousands of websites make the error of hiding their main link navigation such that the search engine cannot find everything efficiently..
Backlinks serve the function of linking one website to another.
Backlinks serve as a signal to a search engine that your content is worthy enough by other sites, earning a high rank in the search engine and being visible.
Get as many high quality and relevant links to point to your website as you possibly can. This will help enhance your rankings over time all by itself.
Optimize Load Times
Load time refers to the time it takes for your page to display complete information once someone visits that specific URL.
Page load time is important for traffic — you want to focus on it in order to attract and keep traffic on your website.
Average page load time contributes heavily to your overall user experience. As such, you should prioritize performance optimization from the start.
Pages with a high load time have high bounce rates, which causes visitors to spend less time on the website.
And less traffic means fewer conversion opportunities. This is where poorly performing websites can hurt you the most.
So performance matters. Be sure to optimize it as much as you possibly can.
Focus on Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement such as likes, shares and tweets help increase your rankings on search engines other than Google.
Thus, it has become extremely important to keep your social media network strong. This can boost up your ranking and increase the visibility of your site to increase organic traffic.
Make your content attractive to users, add share buttons on your website, and ask your readers to share your content.
And always, remember to link some of the content that you share back to the website.
Customize Your Meta Descriptions
A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a summary of a web page.
It can greatly increase your click rates, since it is the most obvious part of your SERP listing that people notice when a page appears during their search.
To get an upper hand on your competitors, make sure to include keywords in meta descriptions. This will help maximize the click through rate for organic impressions.
Check Domain Authority (DA) of Competitors
DA is a score given between 1-to-100, comparing the relative strength of your domain to all others on the internet. It is specifically designed to predict how a website will rank on the SERPs.
Since each website has a DA, a high score indicates that the website has a higher chance to rank well.
Every single website starts with a DA of one and then increases its authority score through various factors such as quality of content, number of internal and external links (by far the most important part of DA), search engine friendliness, etc.
Find out your competitors DA through various websites which tell you how much you need to improve to be better than them.
Conclusion
The tips given in this article should help you outperform your competitors and improve your rankings.
You do not need to completely think out of the box in order to overcome your rivals.
However, subtle changes in your approach can go a long way for helping your website stand out on search engines.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain, sourced from pexels.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Judy Robinson
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