If you don’t follow SEO trends and tips (as an SEO starter or expert), and your site lags behind the competition in terms of optimization and keeping up-to-date, you are in trouble.
As search engine optimization is all about making you show up in search results, ignoring that or getting it wrong will practically make you invisible for potential customers.
If, on the contrary, you do everything right, this will result in increased traffic, more leads, and, naturally, more sales.
Unfortunately, SEO ranking factors seems to have undergone numerous changes in the span of a few short years. This basically means that what worked a couple of years ago is no longer relevant. Let’s look at a few expert tips which will give you insight on what will do the trick in the current year.
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1- Work On “Almost There” Posts
If you take a good look at your posts, you might find out that many of them almost rank well. Check which phrases rank above 10 and make sure you rework the posts that contain them, paying more attention to semantic SEO. Expand your content, adding detailed descriptions, examples, pictures, anything that might add to overall page quality.
Do this kind of revision every couple of months, so that you don’t fall behind on optimization by missing new Google criteria for relevance.
If you do your best to improve the quality of your posts, you are quite likely to include many keywords in a natural way, without overdoing it, or trying to cram. (You can find a huge list of tips on how to do so here.)
Think about what would make you proud, then put it on the page for the world to see. Chances are that is going to make a massive difference and improve the quality of your content in leaps and bounds.
2 – Discover Video Potential
Don’t forget that quality always comes before quantity. You might have an incredible number of indexed pages, but shallow posts will hardly attract and maintain traffic to your page. Get rid of superficial or scarce information that is more likely to hurt your ranking than add value to it.
Focus on engaging the visitor with meaningful information. A great way to do so is by creating and adding video materials. Check out this article on the power of video to boost website SEO.
Videos will make visitors feel they are interacting with the site and you have a lower risk of losing traffic due to the fact that people are bored with a post.
It is much easier and quicker to fast forward a video, which is a couple of minutes long, than to read the transcript equivalent, which is likely to be several hundred words. Not everybody has the time and patience to read that.
3 – Dust Off Existing Content
It is very important to watch out for disposable, once-off information that is relevant for only a short time. You might be surprised to find out how much it can hurt your SEO, if not taken care of. Audit your existing content, work to optimize and update it, then let it circulate.
Analyze your gaps and omissions and create new stuff that will fill the voids. Make sure what you create meets business and audience needs, so that you don’t waste time on useless fillers. Do your best to prolong the newly infused life into your site pages by employing images and video, where applicable.
Update the information you are posting and let it reach as many places as possible, such as social media, customer e-mail addresses, business associates etc. Spend a couple of days focusing on publishing, promoting and putting your message across. Use both free and paid media to aid you in your efforts.
4 – Engage Users
Whether you decide to rewrite existing posts or create entirely new ones, focus should be on engaging users. Probably the most important step is to organize the content in an easy enough way to read, by paying attention to formatting. Your paragraphs, whitespaces and images should come in the right places to facilitate user experience.
If you are going to include links and offers on your page, do pick those which are completely relevant to the information at hand. Your page bounce rate depends entirely on whether the content you are offering answers a user’s query and provides desired additional information that might be of interest after reading what’s on the page. You can easily achieve this by providing related LSI keywords that will intrigue the reader and keep them engaged longer.
5 – Breathe New Life Into Old Posts
Don’t be so focused on writing new stuff that you never go back and review the existing one. Information can easily become outdated, thus rendering valuable articles obsolete, for lack of a tiny update. Don’t make this mistake. Making an outdated post relevant again is not a difficult task.
First you need to check the facts and see what is still valid. Then replace any photos and imagery that look old. Next optimize titles and paragraph headings in accordance with the latest SEO rules. Create or add an adequate number of keywords, descriptions and title tags.
See to it that no broken links are left on any page and proofread for typos or other mistakes with the fresh eyes of not having seen the text for a while. It’s amazing what a difference following these steps can make to your posts.
6 – Build Useful Stuff
If you have a brand and get mentioned by someone, do reach out in cases when they haven’t provided links to your website. You can find a useful resource on link building strategies at https://searchengineland.com/organic-traffic-link-building-small-businesses-269353. Organic traffic and links are extremely important to desired ranking results, don’t miss out on opportunities for building a strong foundation in relation to that.
Another great approach is to build a useful piece of software that is valuable to your customers and you provide it for free. This is an awesome way to ensure loyalty. At the same time, reaching out to promote such a tool will result in additional number of links, pointing to your website.
I hope these expert SEO tips help you boost your natural traffic. Let me know what you think in the comment box.