There’s so much SEO advice on the web nowadays that it can be difficult to know which pieces of advice to follow. There’s a huge focus on links, however, changes to the algorithm make it more challenging to know which type of links are working for and against you. There’s also talk about the need for content, even though there are sites that rank well with barely any content. And then there’s the technical SEO, in which people will focus on crawling issues or HTML markup.
Having too many options can cause distractions. That’s why, in this post, we only want you to focus on 6 specific tactics that will improve your site’s SEO over time and compliment your overall digital marketing strategy.
Niche keyword selection
This is the most critical step that keeps on getting overlooked nowadays. If you don’t aim to rank for the niche keywords that can yield a quick win, it will be difficult to get your website to rank well. Select a portfolio of keywords and assess the number of competing websites as well as the types of websites that are competing to rank for that keyword.
Add Schema to markup your site’s HTML.
Schema markup has been around for a few years now, however, there are still several websites that aren’t using it in a way to help Google and other search engines better understand the content that appears on their web pages.
Google’s Search Console gives webmasters the option to highlight HTML elements that appear on a website and then to implement it using the Schema code that it provides. Implementing the schema markup correctly can improve the site’s keyword ranking performance, as well as the click-through rate from the organic search listing.
Create compelling, shareable content.
Google has been saying this for years. If you want to get people to link to your website’s content, you need to publish content that people are willing to share with their audience. Whether this is in the form of an informative article, images, web tools, videos etc., people need to be incentivised to share the content out of interest or value that they can share with others.
Commit to an online publishing strategy.
The key to ‘breaking through’ on the web is getting published. The easiest way to get published is by publishing informative blog posts for an audience on the web. This can then be expanded into guest blog posts, contributing to web magazines as a columnist or even participating or hosting interviews.
Improve the page loading time on your website.
The technical structure of your website can be your own worst enemy at times. Put your website into tools such as GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools to see how the loading time and sequence is. If it is loading much slower than the competitors, it could be a factor that is preventing your site from ranking in a higher position.
Page speed becomes more important as website’s start to rank towards the top of Google. The reason being is that Google starts to preload the websites that are in the first position since they expect the web user to click on the first result on Google.
What kind of impact should you expect to see?
Within a couple of weeks, you should start to see the site’s overall keyword visibility increase in the Google Search Console. The niche keywords should start to lift in their organic search performance and the knock-on effect should see the main keywords that you are trying to rank for improving. This should naturally lead to an increase in organic search traffic for your website.
Author bio
Nathan Elly is the branch manager for the digital marketing agency Digital Next. When he isn’t busy optimising online marketing campaigns, you can find him on the futsal pitch.
