Advanced SEO Strategies and Techniques
If you are looking for higher Google rankings, then this blog post is for you. In our experience here at SharpCove, success with search engine optimization comes with getting the fundamentals down first then implementing advanced strategies and techniques.
So, your website is up with the basic seo practices put in place, and you are ready for higher Google rankings. Where should you begin?
Boost Your Site’s Loading Speed
First, you will need to improve your site’s loading speed. Google does not reward you for having a fast loading website, but it will penalize you for having a slow loading site. Not to mention everyone hates a slow loading website. You can lose visitors and be demoted by Google for a slow website since they don’t see any reason to rank your site higher. One tool that can help you analyze your site’s speed is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Visit this tool then add a url to a landing page on your website that gets a lot of traffic and click “analyze”. The results this gives you will tell you where you can tune up this page for it to load faster. One thing this tool doesn’t tell you is the actual page speed. A tool that can accurately tell you this is GTMetrix.com. It will show you data on how your page loads for real life users.
Fix Your Technical SEO Issues
Second, you will want to fix any technical seo issues. How can you identify and fix these? The easiest way it to log into your Google Search Console account. If you see any issues with your DNS, server connectivity or robots.txt fetch then that is something you will want to fix immediately. If you see a green check mark then you are good to go. Pay close attention to your crawl errors. It is okay if you see a few 404 errors, but if you see 100’s of errors here then that is something you will want to fix. Usually, when a visitor requests a page on your site that doesn’t exist, a 404 error returns meaning that the page was not found. This type of response tells both browsers and search engines that the page does not exist. Returning a lot of these errors can throw up a red flag to search engines hurting your search engine ranking.
Research Your Keywords
The next advanced technique in approving your Google ranking is to do some keyword research. There are three tools we will talk about that help you discover the best keywords to use for your site and content.
The first tool to use is Google suggest. Enter a keyword into Google but do not hit enter. You will see some long tail keywords that Google suggests that you can target. If Google is suggesting the keyword then it is one that is searched often. Another tool you can use is Uber Suggest tool to see hundreds of these Google Suggest keywords in one long list.
Next, is to find keywords that you are already ranked for. These are untapped keywords that can be identified using the Google Search Console. Login to your Google Search Console account, click Search Analytics. Sort the results list by position and scroll down until you hit positions 11-15. These are the keywords you are already ranked for on the second page of Google. Giving these keywords some on-page/off-page seo help can get these to the first page pretty quickly.
The third tool that can help with your keyword research is SEMrush. On this website you will enter a competitors website, and it will give you a list of keywords they are ranked for. Pretty cool.
Develop Good Content
Publishing a lot of unique content doesn’t always work. Google’s goal is to show the best result for a keyword. So, blogging often doesn’t work like it used to. Instead, publish less often but make each piece of content you do publish really good. Like, amazingly good. How do you do this? First, make your content very actionable and have it contain practical information. Second, make sure your content is at least 1,890 words long. Finally, you want to make infographics a part of your content. Why? Infographics get the more shares on social media accounts than any other type of content format.
Implement On-Page SEO
Publish your content on a short url. Research shows that short url’s rank higher than long url’s. Your url as well as page title should also include your target keywords
Next, include your target keyword once in the first 100 words of your article. Why? Google puts more weight on keywords that appear on the top of your page. So, use target keywords right off the bat when writing content.
Finally, add outbound links to your page. Google wants to make sure your content is a comprehensive resource on that topic and the way to do that is by linking to pages that are also useful on the topic.
Get Off-Page SEO with Link Building
After you publish a piece of content, it is time for content promotion and link building. How do you do this? The easiest way is to obviously share it on your social media accounts. Another way is broken link building.
Broken link building (back linking): Find a page you want to get a link from. Once you have found a site that fits your niche, find broken links on that page then let the site owner know about their broken link. Offer the site owner to replace the broken link with your content instead.
Optimize Site Around User Experience Signals
Want more? Optimize your website around user experience signals. Google is now using what is called Google Rank brain. It is believed that Google Rank brain measures how users interact with your site in Google search and ranks you partially based on these user signals. A correlation has been found between CTR and ranking. High CTR outranked those with lower CTR. Also, looks at how often people bounce from your site. So, increasing your CTR and Bounce rate can also help your Google Search Ranking.
