For every content writer or marketing specialist, designing the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy is of essential priority.
Google ranking not only drives content traffic but also boosts business profit through lead generation and ROI in marketing investments.
Hence, optimizing your web pages with SEO techniques is a mandatory step toward expanding your customer base and enhancing the conversion rate.
Your business sites gain more leads and sales when ranked higher on various search engines. Moreover, a higher position on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) attracts new customers online and enhances your business’s authenticity on digital platforms.
Note: Web content with no SERP visibility is bound to fail.
To maintain coherence and a steady online presence, your web page requires a long-term SEO strategy that increasingly grows your organic traffic.
How to Improve Your Google Ranking?
Reaching first place on the Google result page requires consistently publishing unique content with the best SEO practices.
Here are the five essential tips that can help improve your content position on search engine result pages and elevate your customer reach.
1. Enhance On-Site SEO
On-site SEO or on-page SEO is the continuous practice of optimizing the content on websites, allowing you to achieve search engine rankings and earn organic traffic.
Enhancing on-site SEO includes publishing high-quality and relevant content and upgrading the headlines and titles. In addition, incorporate high-definition images and infographics that reflect the authoritativeness and trustworthiness of your content.
Why is On-Page SEO Important?
On-site SEO helps search engines understand the relevancy of your content with the audience query.
The search engines look for particular competitive keywords on your web pages, be they long-tail or short-tail. These traditional and effective SEO strategies still prefer content with quality keywords and relatable lingo.
However, there are various other techniques to improve your on-site SEO ranking.
Such techniques include optimizing meta descriptions, URLs, and title tags, writing long-form blogs, using external links for SEO rankings, etc.
Here is how to optimize your on-site SEO.
1. Incorporate Keywords
The first step towards keyword optimization is incorporating the primary keyword within the first hundred words of your article.
Google or similar search engines focus on keywords that appear early in the article more than those that appear later.
It helps Google understand more about your article and, as a result, try to detect the degree of relevancy between the user query and the content.
2. Use External or Outbound Links
Websites with external links outrank those with only internal links.
When your webpage contains outbound links to other resourceful pages, google labels your website as one of the informative sites.
It enables google to learn more about your page’s subject and decide the worthiness of your content for SERPs.
3. Create Long-form Content
Long-form content allows you to attract a wide range of keywords and topics. Thus, enabling higher ranking and generating organic traffic for a long time.
However, not all article topics can give you the scope to write a long-form blog.
In that case, you can aim at creating a blog that is 10% longer than your competing site. This enables you to achieve your desired rank and beat your rival site.
4. Add Keywords 2-3x Times
The exact amount of keyword density can enhance your on-site SEO.
Adding your target keyword twice or thrice across your content can boost your ranking. Google crawls the whole webpage to extract relevant data for the user.
It identifies key takeaways like using keywords and related terminologies and deciding the relevancy of your content.
To be clear, flooding your content with keywords doesn’t help your google ranking. On the contrary, it is categorized as keyword stuff.
2. Check Your Technical SEO
Technical SEO is still a relevant rank-boosting strategy that ensures a website meets the technical requirements of an advanced search engine.
Technical optimization includes essential elements like indexing, crawling, rendering, and website architecture, which increase organic traffic to your website.
Importance of Technical SEO
Even if your content is of high quality, it doesn’t ensure organic ranking. It’s because technical SEO requires your content to enable search engines to find, crawl, and index the pages on your site.
On a more advanced level, to optimize your website technically, the web pages must be free of duplicate content, enable fast loading, security, and remain optimized for all devices, whether a computer, smartphone, or tablet.
You can improve the technical optimization of your website by structuring the URL of your website and modifying your web page for smartphone devices of all sizes.
Monitor your technical SEO elements by adding backlinks, fixing duplicate content issues, and eliminating 404 error pages.
A few crucial aspects of technical SEO that you must consider are:
1. Mobile Optimization
60% of worldwide technological operations are done on smartphones and tablets.
Customers, naturally, prefer websites and content pages that they can access through their cell phones.
Ensure that your website is hundred percent mobile friendly. It makes your website accessible for search engine bots and audiences who prioritize Google’s usage on mobiles.
To check your site’s mobile optimization, you can use the website URL and test it on the Mobile-Friendly Testing tool.
The tool will provide insights enabling you to make the necessary changes to optimize your webpages further.
2. Page Speed
Page speed is another determining factor that concerns quality technical SEO. It typically refers to the time your page requires for loading.
This depends on factors like videos, high-quality images, documents, and the other weight your website may carry.
You can run your website on various speed-checking online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to test how fast your web page can load its content.
A generic website performance report gives a list of suggestions to enhance the website’s loading speed.
3. Search Console
Google Search Console indexes your webpage for broader coverage. If you optimize the web pages correctly, google will quickly find your pages and add them to their index.
It’s necessary to monitor your Index Coverage for a better perception of your site performance.
To get such data, head over to the Index option and then to Coverage. If Google has trouble indexing your website, they’ll let you know.
These problems can be negligible in magnitude. But, when you fix those anomalies, they increase your website’s overall efficiency.
3. Incorporate LSI Keywords into Your Page
Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI keywords refer to conceptually related terms that enable search engines to get an idea about what the website contains.
For example, if the primary keyword for your content is ‘loan transaction’, then your LSI keywords can be an array of words like credit score, bank balance, outstanding principle, home loans, and rate of interest.
This is how Google categorizes the article under a specific topic.
Google typically uses a similarly advanced approach to understand the relevance of a page. It analyzes the entire webpage to determine its content with the help of relevant phrases and terms.
In such cases, there’s no better bar to set than your competitor’s website.
Significance of Relevant Terms And Phrases
Earlier keyword density was of prime importance because search engines used to look for specific keywords to understand what the article explains.
With time, Google has become more advanced as it scrutinizes every string of words and searches for semantically related phraseology.
Hence, keyword density can downplay the web content if you go berserk with keyword placement. Instead, study key factors about strategic keyword placement and begin to sprinkle the right frequency of keywords in the desired areas of your content.
Note that semantically related words don’t mean synonyms but words that are closely associated with the content topic. For instance, in an article about cold brew, you can include words like coffee, filter, creams, and ice.
How to Find LSI keywords on Webpage?
We can search for LSI keywords on various platforms, tools, and applications. Some of the efficient methods are:
1. LSI Graph
Various free online LSI tools like LSI Graph generate latent semantic indexing keywords on any topic. If you insert the primary keyword in the search bar, the tool will produce a list of related keywords you can use in your article.
Expect a relevancy score as well.
2. Google Autocomplete
This is another technical process that suggests related terms and distributes them all over the content. These terms are the general words that users look for while searching for specific topics.
3. Related Searches
It’s similar to Google Autocomplete. However, it offers related terms at the bottom instead of keywords to search for. This helps brands that target a variety of high and low-competition keywords.
4. Bold Terms in Google Description
Have you noticed bold terms in google snippet descriptions? They are semantical keywords that google prefers in a particular niche.
To get an idea about possible keywords that can enrich your article, you can skim through Google’s search results for a headstart.
This is another helpful tool that finds terms related to your target keyword.
Now, how can you use the LSI keyword?
There is no straightforward method of using the LSI keyword.
It’s better when you scatter the related phrases all over the article. As long as Google observes these terms anywhere on the page, your content is ready to function for a ranking scheme.
Ensure that you include LSI terms in your title tag, images, heading, and sub-headings, and a few times in the middle of your content.
4. Match Your Search Intent
Search intent is one of the primary targets of google ranking. It’s also known as User Intent.
When a user searches the internet searching for some particular information, the details that fulfill a user’s search purpose helps cater to the search or audience intent.
User Intent can be informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional searches.
For instance, if you’re looking for a suitable vocational course online.
Google results give you multiple subject-course options with a variable time. The top results talk about which institutes or websites are providing such courses. Keep in mind Google won’t show you course prices or course names.
This is how search intent works. Google is specific about what a user wants.
Why is Search Intent Important?
Satisfying the user intent is Google’s main priority. It’s a massive part of your SEO approach that enables ranking improvement.
Google’s research content has inferred that even backlinks and traditional ranking strategies matter, but search intent is still of prime importance.
Google focuses on how people interact with a webpage or content, including engagement and retention metrics.
When users get what they’re looking for, motivating them to revisit, you can expect your page ranking to improve. Similarly, Google can push your content a few spots below if your content isn’t matching the user’s search intent.
In the process, search engine algorithms may scan your competition’s content for a score-based comparison.
How Can You Improve Your Search Intent?
The following practices can help you apply search intent strategies to your websites:
1. Check your Search Intent
Before writing your content, it’s a good practice to check similar webpages and identify the category it belongs to.
Even if the user intent is obvious, you must still check them in various first-page articles on google to understand what content formats and types their opinions are represented in.
2. Enhance Existing Content
There can be multiple SEO-related issues for why your content doesn’t perform well.
Search intent can be one of them. You can enhance your former content by incorporating relevant and contemporary topics and infographics. Also, research to look for updates or developments about the core topic your content pillars focussed on.
An effective measure to achieve fast organic traffic is by re-optimizing your existing content as per transforming search intent and updating new information.
5. Minimize your Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the approximate percentage of visitors who leave your webpage without taking action, such as clicking on the inbound or outbound links and reading through the entire article.
Optimizing this should be your next action step while enhancing your content ranking.
Why Does Bounce Rate matter?
There are three significant reasons:
- A visitor who has left your website without taking action is a non-converter. In that case, decreasing your bounce rate can improve your conversion too.
- Google uses bounce rate as its ranking factor. Experts have inferred that first-page google articles have less bounce rate.
- If your page has a high bounce rate, it hints at problems concerning content positioning, user experience, page design, or copywriting techniques.
How Can You Improve the Bounce Rate?
There are a few methods you can use to improve your bounce rate:
1. Enhance the ‘Above the Fold’ Section
The ‘above-the-fold’ section of the webpage is the primary section you encounter before scrolling down to the content.
You can improvise this section by improving the content and ads placement being displayed.
It allows the audience to comprehend the article and makes scrolling easy.
2. Structure Your Content
When you structure your page properly, readers get access to the various sections of the article. They find what they’re looking for without having to read to the end. Such is the power of tactical headline creation and placement on blogs.
As content development experts label it, learn the art is creating skimmable content.
3. Add Visuals
For an article to be presentable before the audience, incorporate visual content like infographics, high-quality images, and videos with a hook or CTA. It transforms your content into a lead magnet or at least helps pull prospects deeper into your sales funnel.
Verdict
Google’s ranking strategy is a combination of traditional techniques and modern algorithms.
When you curate your content with a customer-based approach and focus on making the content easily visible, the Google algorithm is satisfied, promoting your content to the first page of ranking.
Google ranking is altering every day. SEO strategies are getting more challenging as we progress towards a no-click and voice search querying mechanism.
SEO experts, marketers, and website owners must constantly upgrade their content and SEO techniques with changing search behavior and Google algorithm iterations.
