8 Not-So-Surprising SEO Techniques To Boost Your Rankings

As a business owner, you want your website to be listed on the first two pages of Google search results. This is because 91.5% of Google traffic goes to the sites on page one, and 4.8% goes to page two. If your company is listed beyond the second page, you can expect to have little to no traffic at all.

Search engines are a constantly shifting landscape, depending on who’s searching. Google started putting more value on personalized search years ago, taking into consideration factors like demographics, location, search history, and device used to determine the difference between each search result.

While personalization has made it easier for users to search for information online and for marketers to attract more customers, the number one marketing challenge remains to be not getting enough search traffic. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in handy. It’s still the most effective way of boosting your rankings.

Quick SEO fixes

The problem now is that you will need to invest a lot of time and money to implement SEO strategies and wait for significant results. Thankfully, there’s a handful of techniques that you can quickly implement and get results right away.

1. Add compelling multimedia to your content.

No, Google doesn’t consider a page’s multimedia a direct ranking signal. What makes multimedia, such as images, infographics, videos, GIFs, and audio files, effective in boosting your ranking is that it keeps users engaged on your page, which is a ranking factor that search engines use in their algorithm.

Videos and images, in particular, make users stay on your site longer, which is what Google wants to see. The key is to insert multimedia where they are most useful in providing users the information they need. Instead of going back to Google to search for a supporting image or video of a topic you discussed on your site, embedding a relevant video or image gives users more reasons to stay and engage with your site.

2. Provide more value to your content.

You create content to improve your ranking on Google. Yes, that’s correct. However, you need to keep in mind that you’re also writing content to answer people’s queries and solve problems. In other words, your content should not only make your site more crawlable by bots but also more useful to humans. After all, users are the ones who are going to comment, like, and share your posts. People don’t care about keywords, H1s, or alt tags. What they want is to find the best answer to their questions.

Nowadays, search engines are smart enough to determine whether your content is only aimed at manipulating your rankings. At the same time, they also care about the value that your content provides to users. This is why you should make it a point to perfect your content creation process to ensure that you are bringing value to your readers.

Aside from that, you should also make sure to publish new content consistently to continually improve your SEO ranking.

3. Know the keywords you need to own.

Keyword research needs to be viewed as the foundation of all digital marketing practices. It’s an immensely integral part of your SEO strategy, which is why you need to make sure you identify the keywords that you need to own and prioritize. Keep in mind that you need to consider search volume, as well as competition and keyword effectiveness index (KEI). You need to know the keywords you need to rank based on your products. You will then need to plug them into search engines and check what the competition is on the SERP.

Some of the most important tools you need to use for your keyword research, include Google Adwords Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator, and Google Trends.

Once you’ve identified the keywords you need to prioritize, you must optimize them. A trusted keyword research tool can help suggest keywords, search volumes for each keyword, find out how a keyword will rank, and check the number of clicks you can anticipate for each keyword.

4. Identify and fix broken links.

Identifying and fixing broken links in your site is another way of improving the user experience. You can use Check My Links or other similar Google Chrome extensions to quickly scan a page for broken links. If your site has hundreds of thousands of pages, you can use an SEO site audit tool, like Screaming Frog to crawl your site. After that, you will need to export the broken links as a CSV file and swap out any broken links you find.

5. Assign the pages Google bots can ignore.

Experts say that sites only have a limited ‘crawl budget’ when it comes to indexing pages. Google bots don’t spend all day crawling every page on your site. Since there’s a huge possibility that there are some pages you want on SERPs, other pages don’t need to be seen in search results pages because they aren’t likely to drive organic traffic.

To design the pages you want Google bots to crawl, use the robots.txt file and put a noindex/nofollow tab on them so they don’t get indexed.

6. Optimize title tags to increase CTR.

Title tags are one of the most important factors that have a significant impact on your SEO ranking.

In your title tags, you should include long-tail keywords and limit the characters to 50-60 characters, which is the optimal character length. Aside from that, title tags should also be easy for people to understand since humans will be the ones searching for those keywords. Some SEO experts recommend placing keywords toward the front of title tags.

7. Insert internal links where needed.

SEO experts agree that internal links are an underutilized tactic. Google said though that internal links can help bots understand the structure of your site, as well as crawl and index new pages easily. They can also help rank specific pages, especially if you funnel authority from one page to another.

Say you have a product page that you want to rank higher. You can go into your blog posts and find one that has a lot of traction. You can then add an internal link directly to that page. Aside from sending authority to that page, inserting internal links where necessary can also help readers find your products and services more easily.

8. Link to quality references on external sites.

When you link your content to other sites with domain authority, Google sees it as a signal that you are providing good, valuable content to readers, improving your credibility and ranking.

You don’t want to add as many links as you want though to avoid adding irrelevant or low-quality links that will only make your content look like it’s trying to manipulate your rankings. Doing so will also make your content look spammy, diminishing its credibility and value. Instead, insert high-quality links that are relevant and add more value to your content.

Final thoughts

So, you see, you don’t need to wait for months to get the results you want when it comes to improving your SEO. With the tips mentioned above, you also don’t need to invest a lot of money in your search engine optimization strategy. Make sure to pay attention to your metrics though as you implement new SEO techniques to improve your SEO ranking.