These days, everyone goes online to search for answers – be it about finding a product, locating a service, getting answer to a query or problem, and even much more. But did you know 75% of users online don’t even click past the results shown on the search engine’s first page? This shows how important it is to rank higher in SERPs and get to page one. Here are the top five SEO techniques that will help you reach that coveted spot:
- Optimizing your site for mobile browsing and search: With a growing number of mobile and tablet users, it has become important to optimize your site and content for mobile search and browsing. Since November 2016 when Google launched its mobile-first index, the search engine giant too has started using a site’s mobile version as its primary index (unlike the earlier desktop version). From creating a responsive site to using Schema.org structured data, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, optimizing images and page speed (by leveraging browser caching, code minification and reducing redirects), you have to use all the steps you can for mobile optimization.
- Focus on benefit-oriented content curation: It’s true that quality content is king. But it’s equally true that it’s almost an impossible task to go on creating quality content day in and day out. So, the next best thing you can do is content curation where you collect, catalogue and share the most interesting things about a specific topic. Be it simply aggregating all relevant news at a single location, distilling the key concepts from a large volume of information, finding a general trend or insight from the pile of information, or merging various news to present them from a fresh/new point of view, there are various ways to curate content. But to make them stand out, focus on what your audience wants and ensure they offer some useful takeaways that your audience will love and even get tempted to share.
- Build quality links: Apart from quality content and RankBrain (Google’s machine-learning AI system for processing search results), links feature among the top three ranking factors. So, try to find authority, reputed and reliable websites and blogs from which you can get backlinks. You may also ask if they would be interested in reciprocal linking. Searching modern directories (like AllTop) that curate the best websites or blogs in almost every niche can help you shortlist a few prospective link building opportunities. However, make sure you have competitive, relevant content on your site because links alone won’t do much when your site has low-quality content.
- Optimize for rich answers: Rich answers are the results that are usually displayed at first among the top organic search results. In 2015, Google rich answers grew significantly and were displayed for almost 20% of all queries. As the number is likely to grow significantly in 2017, it pays to optimize for rich answers. For getting into Google’s rich answer box, you have to optimize well for your niche- and/or industry-related queries. You can do this in various ways, including openly asking the question in your content, having a direct answer followed by more extensive backup information, using command words at the start of your sentences, writing clear and unambiguous headings, creating Q&A pages, using lists etc.
- Voice search optimization: 2016 Internet Trends Report by KPCB shows that voice search queries have increased by seven times since 2010. When compared to 2008 data, it was a whopping 35X increase. A January article in Forbes predicted 2017 to be the year of voice search. With the growing precision in speech recognition, it’s likely that people would soon start using it all the time unlike today when they use it sparingly. By optimizing your content for voice search, you can stay ahead of the race when the trend really catches on. Since 50% of all searches by 2020 will be voice searches (as predicted by comscore), it surely pays to be future-ready.
Using Quality SEO Tools
To help with implementing your SEO techniques, you must use a quality SEO (ex. https://www.SEOAnalytix.com) to track and Measure the SEO performance of your website and that of its competitors.
