Stuck in a cycle of tweaks that won’t move the needle?
This article reveals white hat techniques that can potentially double, triple, or even tenfold your traffic from organic search.
Google’s system for ranking websites contains a number of algorithms designed to deliver the “best” results.
These algorithms take many factors into account, including the words of a search query, relevance, page usability, source knowledge, geolocation, and parameters.
In addition, the weighting of these factors depends on the nature of a request.
When it comes to hot topics, freshness matters a lot.
With a dictionary type definition, the clearance and authority of the page play a more important role.
To ensure that the algorithms work as expected, Google employs an army of quality checkers.
They follow strict guidelines developed by Google to ensure that the algorithm’s output meets established standards for page quality and requirements met. These guidelines are a must for anyone serious about building a high-performing website.
According to Google, the search algorithm considers five key factors to determine which results appear at the top of search results:
- meaning of your request.
- Relevance of websites.
- content quality.
- Usability of websites.
- context and settings.
By addressing these five factors, you’ll put yourself in a position to outperform the competition. Here are some specific tips on how to do this:
1.Mobile first
I started promoting a mobile-first approach to SEO in March 2015 after focusing on Google’s upcoming mobile update.mobilegeddon.”
The name gained momentum, but the April 21, 2015 update didn’t cause as much of a shock as was then expected.
However, he warned everyone that cell phones are here and not “the future” anymore. Those who ignored the warning to become mobile later paid the price.
Today, Google is all-in on mobile.
If you’re not sure whether your site meets the mobile-friendliness criteria, log in to your Search Console account and view the Mobile-Friendliness report.
Google reports mobile device issues there so you can take appropriate action to comply.
2. Request your business listing
Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business, is a free business listing.
Business profiles appear in Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. If your business has a physical location or travels to customers, you can create a business profile on Google.
The 5 most important advantages of the Google company profile
- It’s FREE advertising – cheaper than paid search and faster than SEO.
- Google Maps/3-Pack prefers geographically relevant companies.
- An optimized profile makes a good first impression.
- A good number of stars inspires trust and provides social proof.
- The ability to review profile performance and gain insights.
As Google continues to improve its ability to provide hyper-local results, having complete and accurate data in your Google Business profile is extremely important.
It continues to be an easy win as many companies have not even applied for registration.
3. Improve your site experience
Google’s site experience is defined by a set of signals designed to measure how a user is responding to a webpage. This measure goes beyond the basic value of information.
It uses Web Essentials, a set of metrics measuring page load performance, interactivity and visual stability, as well as mobile-friendliness, HTTPS and intrusive interstitial policies.
In cases where multiple pages can meet the relevance search criteria, page experience has more weight.
A page that provides the information you are looking for always wins over a less relevant page but a better page experience.
Short page experiences can be the SERP tiebreaker.
4. Focus on User Experience (UX)
Google has always encouraged webmasters to make providing a good user experience their primary goal.
As the algorithm gets “smarter,” the sites that do will be positioned to benefit the most. A good user experience goes much further than writing clean code.
According to this Oxford Journal study, “The goal of enterprise UX design is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the usefulness, ease of use and enjoyment of interacting with a product. »
For our purposes, your website is the product. The goal is to first determine a user’s intent, and then develop a methodology for smooth navigation—a methodology that evokes positive emotions and results in an overall good experience.
Incorporating UX best practices is easy. The web is full of templates and tips.
What separates the pros from the amateurs is A/B testing.
Each of us has our own prejudices that influence the structure of a website.
By running a series of experiments, you can quantify what works and what doesn’t, and keep testing until you get the right results.
5. Do your keyword research
It’s true – keyword research is still important.
With Google providing less keyword data, third parties like Ahrefs and Semrush have developed their own keyword tools to fill the gap.
However, thanks to RankBrain and BERT, the way keyword research results are conducted and used has changed.
At its core, RankBrain is machine learning. This allows Google to put things in context instead of just relying on metadata chains. Google now understands linguistic nuances like derivations, synonyms, and answers.
BERT is an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
The primary goal is to provide better search results for longer, more conversational searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” affect the context of a query.
At the time of launch in October 2019, Google predicted that BERT would affect 10% of all US searches.
The new generation of keyword tools takes this into account by generating relevant data such as parent headings, keyword groups and search intent.
Armed with this information, users can develop contextually relevant content.
6. Have a well-rounded content marketing plan
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 51% of all respondents say it’s harder to grab audiences’ attention today than it was a year ago.
Since content is one of the most important Google ranking factors, getting it right is important. Again, this represents a great opportunity for those willing to put in the time to make it happen.
Everyone talks about creating “quality content,” but what does that mean?
It’s really about having useful content, finding the right audience, and then reaching that audience.
It doesn’t have to be a difficult exercise. It comes down to having empathy with your prospects and customers. Ann Handley came up with the following formula to sum it up:
Useful x Enjoyable x Inspired = Innovative content
Great content comes in many different forms. A well-rounded content marketing plan includes a combination of the following elements:
- To blog.
- Data-driven visualizations (original research).
- Pictures.
- infographics.
- SlideShare presentations.
- videos.
7. Pay attention to onpage optimization
Did you know that Google publishes its own guide to getting started with search engine optimization? you do that now
Despite its name, this guide is a great resource for anyone looking to maximize their chances of appearing in Google search results.
The guide covers the key fundamentals of the site, including optimization best practices:
- page title.
- Headlines.
- meta descriptions.
- Image alt text.
- Structured Markup.
- Page URLs.
- Internal links.
Additional Resources to Improve Onpage Optimization:
8. Link building revitalizes all other efforts
The day may come when links are less important for rankings, but that day has not yet come. The key is getting the right types of links.
Links relevant to your site. Links that require human editorial review. The types of links that are earned.
My favorite approach to getting relevant links is to create a resource hub. A resource center can work on almost any type of website. Aside from gaining links, a good resource center helps build trust and authority.
Learn about this approach and more by downloading Link Building for SEO: A Complete Guide..
The conclusion
Organic search is a thumb game. There is no better way to dominate the SERPs. But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
If you just focus on the eight areas shown above, you can double, triple, or even tenfold your traffic.
More resources:
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