Not seeing the results you’d hoped for from your search engine optimization efforts? These days it’s not just a matter of publishing great content. You have to have a clear content strategy, build backlinks, and consistently stay up-to-date on new search engine changes and updates.
Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of 25 ways that you can improve your search engine rankings, ranging from understanding search intent to making technical changes to your pages for a better customer experience.
Understanding Search Intent
Every audience (and every audience segment) is different. To better understand your audience and the motivation behind how they landed on your pages, you have to know what they’re really looking for.
- Check your top-ranking pages and make sure you’re ranking well for the keywords you want to target. You’ll more than likely have to target long-tail keywords, but this is a better long-term strategy for the consistent growth of your site. Long-tail keywords mean less competition and higher conversions since you’re honing in on exactly what users are looking for.
- Create content clusters around your main topics. Content clusters start with pillar pages that cover a topic in a broad sense while being held up by supporting pages that go deeper into subtopics. All of these pages are interlinked in order to build and reinforce your authoritativeness (the A of Google’s E-E-A-T). Read more about creating people-first content in our guide.
Improve Your On-Page SEO
On-page SEO describes the factors on your website that you can optimize. They are one of the many things that Google and other search engines look at in order to determine your ranking.
- Optimize your keywords and use them naturally in your title tag, meta description and headings. Structure your content in such a way that the headings flow naturally so that you’ll avoid keyword stuffing.
- Update your meta description and title tags. It’s a simple step that can have a significant impact. Meta descriptions are an important part of a content optimization strategy that encourages users to click, so make sure yours count!
- Create your schema markup using structured data tools. This type of formatting helps search engines better understand the context behind your content. For example, FAQ schema can show your FAQs in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as if they were on your site. Product schemas will show details about your products, and review schemas show ratings and reviews from clients.
Improve the User Experience
User experience, or UX, is a whole subset of specific skills within SEO focused around how easy it is for users to browse and take action on your site.
- Improve your page speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Things like bloated scripts or large images may be causing your pages to load slowly and that could in turn affect the user experience. Take steps to optimize your images, minify your Javascript, CSS and HTML and enable browser caching for a better overall experience.
- Make your pages mobile-responsive. Mobile responsive means that the page changes to fit the design of a variety of mobile devices without having separate versions for every conceivable mobile phone or tablet out there. It’s also worth implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for even better page loading speed.
Build Backlinks the Smart and Strategic Way
- Build internal links as a way to help users navigate your site. Link your internal articles and use them to support your pillar pages.
- Link to reputable sources outside your site to add greater context to your pages in a way that doesn’t compete with, but rather complements, your pages. Linking outside shows search engines that not only are you providing credible information, but you’re linking to likewise authoritative sources.
- Focus on high-quality backlinks from well-known sources. You can get backlinks by way of guest posting or creating deep, authoritative content like your own research or infographics. There are several tools that will look at the current backlinks on your site and help you uncover lucrative linking opportunities.
Focus on Featured Snippets
In some cases, search results load with the descriptive result first as a way to directly address your search intent. These featured snippets from Google help you quickly find what you’re looking for and are a rich source of potential organic traffic.
- Target question keywords. Many featured snippets are the answer to a question your searcher asks. Tailor your content to answer these questions directly using bullet points, numbered lists or tables to increase the odds that they’ll appear in Google’s Featured Snippets or under “People Also Ask.”
- Answer the question quickly and directly. Most featured snippets choose the first 50-60 words of content so that Google doesn’t have to sift through a lot of content to get to the result that people are looking for.
- Structure your content with headings. Make it easy for search engines and readers to follow your content in a logical way with H1, H2 and H3 tags. You want to do everything you can to make it easy for the search engines to choose your site to feature a snippet from rather than your competitors!
Take Advantage of Social Signals
Social signals and content marketing can help further boost your site in the search engines by giving them interactive signals that further grow your E-E-A-T profile.
- Repurpose your content. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Turn blog posts into videos, infographics, listicles, and more. Turn infographics or videos into blog posts. You have a wealth of information at your fingertips; repurpose it to reach your audience.
- Have an engaging social presence. Social signals in and of themselves don’t directly contribute to your Google (or any other search engine) ranking, but they do help you build brand equity.
- Encourage user-generated content. UGC or user-generated content can further help you boost your backlinks while building brand awareness. Encourage users to share their experience trying your product, film an unboxing, or otherwise interacting with your brand by creating content. You can also reach out to a social media marketing agency to get insight on the best ways to connect with your audience and amplify your social media presence.
Watch Out for Technical Issues
Even if up until this point, you’ve done everything right for the best possible search engine ranking, technical glitches and hiccups can still derail your efforts.
- Fix crawl errors. Use Google’s Search Console to uncover any particular errors it ran into while crawling your pages. Make sure all of your pages are indexed and crawlable.
- Create an XML sitemap. If you haven’t already, create and submit an XML sitemap to Google to help it index your page more quickly.
- Avoid issues with duplicate content. Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content from lowering your search engine ranking. Canonical tags (also called rel canonical) is a type of tag that tells search engines that there is a “master” version of a particular document and to index that instead.
Boost Your Local SEO Efforts
Don’t disregard local SEO efforts. Even small steps like claiming your Google My Business profile can help you attract clients that might otherwise not have found your pages.
- Optimize Your Google My Business page. Your Google My Business page can be outfitted with the latest business contact information, photos, reviews, FAQs and more. Make sure yours is fully optimized to take advantage of local SEO.
- Create multiple location pages. If you have several locations, create a unique page tailored to each. Include Google Maps as well as relevant contact information so that users in that area can be sure they’re directed to the correct page for their location.
- Take advantage of local SEO tools. These include getting listed on sites like Yelp or other niche-specific platforms (for example, Angi if you’re involved in the home service industry). Having a presence and getting reviewed through these platforms also helps boost your local SEO efforts.
Monitor and Make Changes
Proper search engine optimization is not a “once and done” process. Search engines are constantly changing and refining how they handle all of these factors, both on-page and off-page. That’s why it’s so important to monitor how your site is doing and take steps to make changes while keeping current with the latest updates.
- Set Up Google Analytics. Google Analytics and Search Console Goals will help you track the traffic, bounce rate, on-page time, and conversions to show you how your site is performing with the traffic you get. Use the information you collect to inform and grow your SEO strategy. Many content management systems (CMS), including Wordpress and others, have plugins that make the process of setting up Google Analytics very simple and straightforward.
- Gather Competitive Intelligence. No site is an island. Conduct a competitor analysis to look at what your competitors are doing. See which keywords they’re focused on, which pages are converting well for them, and how their content strategy is shaping up. Even if you’re currently ranked higher than them, don’t be content to rest on your laurels, as that could change in an instant.
- Revisit your search engine strategy regularly. Check your content for underperforming pages. Improve your pillar posts to be more authoritative. Take steps to improve pages that aren’t converting with proper conversion optimization. Always know where you stand in the search engine rankings and what steps you can take to measurably improve that ranking.
Bonus Tip: Check for AI Content
Can Google detect and does it penalize AI content? Our detailed study reveals a great deal about Google’s definitive stance on approaching AI content.
Google actively seeks out information that’s authoritative, experienced, and shows expertise. These points in turn help build trust and cultivate a sense that “this is a reputable, reliable place for answers to this question.”
Despite all of its advances, it’s still a challenge for AI to generate people-first content, and there are a number of issues with AI text.
Use Originality.ai’s Website Scanner to review potential instances of AI content across your website in 1 click.
Then, to make your web content stand out, focus on creating human-written content that’s deeply informative, informational, supportive and engaging to improve your search engine rankings.
Looking for more insight on how to boost your content marketing efforts?
