Needless to mention, there are tons of healthy benefits of SEO for online businesses that have a website.
We, in the search industry, know that the Search ranking algorithm is changing from time to time, and it’s very important that we should keep an eye on what is changing, what we are doing, how our SEO results are improving, and what else we need to do to stay on top of the game. Without thorough monitoring our entire search strategy will fail. I mean we won’t be able to achieve what we wanted if we don’t monitor the changes happening around us and the efforts we’re putting to tackle those changes.
It’s crucial for us to write a detailed blog post every quarter (that we usually try to do) about the latest changes in search ranking and how one should move forward to improve the search engine results. That makes sure our readers will be able to update their knowledge and track their progress easily.
In this post, I am going to discuss some of the latest strategies one can implement in mid-2022 to ensure their website is climbing up on the search listing ladder. Read on to know those latest strategies and check out whether your search campaign is moving in the right direction or not.
Find out where you are now
This is the very first thing you need to do. Your current status of the keywords will discover a lot of important aspects. Most importantly, finding out your current keyword positioning will help you know about other websites in your niche that are already dominating the search results and how difficult it will be for you to beat them.
Whether you are yet to start your SEO or have already done it for some time, a good understanding of the current keyword performance is of utmost importance. Starting from ‘zero’ will help you begin a no-burden, exciting journey where every single improvement in the positions will be a celebration for you. And starting your SEO campaign from a point somewhere in the middle will help you understand where you are now at SEO and how much improvement you need to make in order to get to that top position.
Your first step of finding out the current status will discover some more important aspects related to your organic traffic data. You can find the traffic data from your Google Analytics and the keyword data from your Google Search Console. Save that data and analyze to understand the most important keywords and landing pages, the performance of those keywords and landing pages and the opportunities for improvement.
Say, some of your important keywords are struggling at the bottom of page-1 or top of page-2. You can easily help bring those keywords up to the top of page-1 with some good SEO techniques, and that is what will give you quick improvement and some confidence as well. So, you may start with those keywords first.
It’s good to make a list of some important keywords and start working on them, but over a period of time you will realize not all of those keywords are equally good for your business. Therefore, it’s important for you to do your keyword analysis well right at the beginning to know which keywords are going to be rewarding and which of them will be a total waste of time for you.
In general, some mid-tail and long-tail keywords are a good choice to start with, because they are a lot easier to include in your content and rank on the search results than some of short-tail or one-term keywords. However, not all of those long-tail or mid-tail keywords are the right choice for you. Some keywords shown in the online tools might be very profitable in your industry, but remember that those keywords might be the right keywords for some of your big dominating competitors, and not necessarily for you.
Figure out the right and the best keywords
Therefore, it’s important to do your keyword research and find out the best keywords that are right for your business. You should also remember that the keywords you’ve found out with the help of the keyword research might not be the final list of keywords for the entire life. The list can change from time to time, so you have to conduct keyword analysis periodically to find out which important terms are trending.
Make your site design and structure the best
What your audience notices about your website in the first glance is its look and performance. Your website must look good, and offer easy navigation and an overall great experience to your users. So, having a beautiful website with great structured sections for easy navigation is of utmost importance today.
The structure and navigation of your website also impact your SEO performance because search engines tend to give more priority to the sites that provide easy navigation and structure for their crawlers to crawl.
There are some technical factors that come into play here. Make sure there are no broken links on your web pages. If you found any, fix those immediately. Also, duplicate content can be an issue, so fix any duplicate content issues on your pages if there are any
Complex site structure together with difficult navigation for users and search engine crawlers, duplicate content issues and broken links can badly affect your search engine rankings, but a good technical SEO audit can help resolve these issues. A technical SEO audit, like the keyword research, is not a one-time thing. You need to be performing it continually to make sure your website is healthy to climb up on the search rankings.
Optimize your website for users and search engines
After ensuring that your website looks good with great structure and easy navigation you need to check the loading speed of your pages. Something around 5 seconds or less was considered to be a good loading time, but I’d suggest you decrease it to 2 or 3 seconds because today’s web audience doesn’t want to wait.
In order to increase the speed of the website help your website pages load fast you can compress all images, use clean code and speed up the server. Make sure your website loads fast and looks good on all devices including computers or laptops, tablets and mobiles.
That is how you optimize your website for your target users. Optimizing it for the search engines requires you to target the best keywords and use them at suitable places in your content. Other than the keyword inclusion in the content you need to look after the on-page optimization including header tags, anchor text, image alt text, file naming etc. and off-page optimization mostly including back-link generation.
These elements might not sound new, but these are very important factors that provide a quick ranking growth to your website, so you need to apply these SEO techniques really well.
Create the best content and promote
Now, this is probably the most significant step of all. You may want to argue what the “best content†actually is. While creating your content, always do remember one thing. Your content must provide the best value to its intended audience in terms of a solution, an answer or some information or education etc.
There is a trick our content team applies here. Before creating the content we try and find out the best content for that particular search query that is found on Google. We then spend a big chunk of time reading that content and finding out if anything is still missing. Nearly every article has a lifespan and if that best content was written a year ago, we find a trigger there and try to offer the most recent information to our audience. So, your content comes out better than the already best content available.
This simple trick works almost 9 out of 10 times, but yes, that’s not the only thing you would do. There is a lot of other points you will have to consider while creating your content.
Once you’ve created the better-than-the-best content for your target audience you need to promote it well. We don’t usually do aggressive promotion, and you should also not depend on aggressive promotion after spending a lot of time creating the best value in your content. Don’t over-promote your content and help bring the readers to your content naturally. Almost all of them will like that way of adding value to their life. What you get in return will be some true reward points that will last forever.
Track the search algorithm updates
I cannot count how many times Google has made updates to its search ranking algorithm over the past 10 or 15 years. We only keep track of the major updates like Panda and Penguin, but forget about most of the minor updates that come in between those major updates that come up almost every year.
I’d advise you to keep track all the major and minor updates to be able to stay on top of the game. Staying up-to-the-minute will also give you ideas to create regular content for your users that are depending on your blog posts for the latest news and information, so yes, staying up-to-date really helps in so many different ways.
Engage with your audience
Audience engagement is highly rewarding. Once you have started the business you are here to stay, and maintaining a strong audience base will act as a gold mine in the long run.
- Announce complimentary offers and service(s).
- Encourage your users to leave positive feedback and reviews.
- Answer their queries and comments in your posts.
- Resolve the cause of their dissatisfaction (if any).
- Turn the first-time buyers into loyal repeat customers.
A good audience engagement results in an increased client retention, which earns you reputation and brand value. Search engines, primarily Google, notices that and it can boost your SEO performance drastically.
Maintain consistency and never give up
Although you have done all or most of the things right, you still can see a roller-coaster ride. I mean there is high possibility of getting ups and downs even though you have a solid foundation and are following the right things.
Sometimes, others could outrank you although being far behind you in terms of following the search engine guidelines and applying legitimate SEO techniques. That’s just part of the game and you shouldn’t lose heart. Short-term bumps shouldn’t affect your long-term goals. They have outranked you now doesn’t mean they will stay there forever. This is why you have to stay consistent in doing the right things. Never give up. I understand it can be very difficult but very rewarding.
If you have anything to add to this, please feel free to leave your ideas in the comments below. It will be highly appreciated.
If you have anything to add to this, please feel free to leave your ideas in the comments below. It will be highly appreciated.