In today’s rapidly shifting world, SEO techniques can change on a dime—and the worst part is, that you might not even know it. Hacks that could have won you a front-page result as recently as 2018 are not only obsolete now, but they may even hurt your website’s rankings. Especially if those so-called “hacks” land your site a Google penalty that’s tough to shift.
That’s why you need to stay on top of the ball in SEO. If not, you’ll fall behind and see your competitors zoom past you in the SERPs.
We spoke with Jacob Warwick, Director ×§×™×“×•× × ×ª×¨×™× × ×•×¨×’× ×™ בגוגל of Communications at Skedulo, and Jesse Teske, SEO Manager at YLighting, to get their expert thoughts on the most current SEO tactics, as well as writer and content marketer Puranjay Singh, founder of GrowthSimple.
In this post, we’ve broken down the top SEO techniques to help you skyrocket your rankings and boost your number of monthly visitors from organic search.
But before we dive into the details on improving your web page ranking, let’s take some time to test your current page ranking on search engine results. Head over to Keyword Rank Checker – a tool that you can וובס ×§×™×“×•× × ×ª×¨×™× use to determine your page ranking based on keyword search:
keyword rank checker - seo techniques
It goes without saying that your goal, as an SEO expert, is make your website reach the top of this list. Higher rankings equals more organic traffic – people you can convert at a later stage, and boost the overall ROI of your SEO strategy.
Sounds like the dream, right? But if you’re feeling disheartened with the keyword ranking check you just ran, don’t panic.
9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2019
I’ll talk about these SEO tactics in this post:
Improve user experience across your entire site
Optimize for voice search
Focus on topic clusters instead of keywords
Go into detail – but only when it’s relevant
Conquer video with YouTube SEO
Build a variety of backlinks
Get a grip over technical optimization
Target local searchers with local landing pages and listings
Know how to measure SEO performance
Ready? Let’s dig in!
Click here to download it for free right now!
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1) Improve User Experience Across Your Entire Website
Let’s kick things off with a brief explanation of what Google is here to do. Just like any search engine, they want to show the best results for a user’s query, and if they’re greeting users with a list of irrelevant, low-quality results, they won’t use them ×̀×§×“× × ×ª×¨×™× ×•×•×‘×¡ again. By the way, Google does this very well, which is why they’re the largest search engine in the world – by far.
You’ll need to think about that constant desire to show the best results when you’re optimizing your website for SEO. Why? The answer is simple: If your site isn’t high-quality enough, you’ll have a tough job ranking for your target keywords.
Nobody wants to land on a spammy website that takes years to load, right? That’s bound to lead to a high bounce rate. And although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that the search engine giant does reward sites that have low bounce rates with higher page ranking:
chart of Google ranking factors, like bounce rate
Google’s reasoning is that if a user spends more time on a page, it’s probably because she found the page useful. And since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So how can you improve the experience that visitors are having with your website? Unfortunately, reducing your overall bounce rate isn’t as simple as removing a few annoying pop-up ads.
Further Reading:
Beginners Guide to SEO: Getting Started With Blogs and Articles
HubSpot’s Global Head of Growth & SEO Explains Why Backlinks Are the Most Effective Factor for Ranking (podcast)
The SEO Framework That Helped Propel Pinterest To Over An Estimated 72M Users (And Over 50B Pages of Content!) (podcast)
Here are five SEO techniques you can use to improve user experience and give your existing content a boost in search engines:
A) Make Your Posts Easy to Read
Ever heard the phrase “formatting content for the web”? To stand any chance at increasing your organic rankings, we need to take that a step further and optimize your content for readability.
Remember: More people reading your content = lower bounce rate = higher organic rankings.
But how do you format your posts for readability? The following formatting tips can help increase the readability of your content:
Shorter paragraphs: Generally speaking, limit each paragraph to 3-4 sentences. It’s even okay to use one-sentence paragraphs if necessary, but use them sparingly or your post will look like a bullet-pointed blog without the bullets. A paragraph is a group of related sentences that support one main idea, so if you split up one paragraph into individual lines, your idea tends to be fragmented and makes it hard to grasp the overall point.
Mixed sentence lengths: Longer sentences are hard to follow on a computer or phone screen, but they can work well when used sparingly, particularly when mixed with medium and short sentences. Here’s a fantastic example of how sentence structures can be varied for readability:
Sentence and paragraph formatting
Sub-headers: Did you know that the average person spends just 37 seconds reading a piece of online content? You can boost that time significantly by including subheadings to make scanning the article easier. Use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page, along with call-out points that are emphasized in bold. Readers should be able to scan your blog post and get the gist of what you’re talking about.
Bullet points: When you have a lot of data—stats, facts, ideas, examples—packed into one paragraph, it makes it easier to read when you list them with bullet points (like this!).
White space and images: When you visit a web page and are greeted with a huge wall of text, it can feel overwhelming. Prevent your site visitors from overwhelm by breaking up large chunks of text with relevant, supporting media, including photos, videos and graphs (in addition to bullet points and sub-headers).
Write quality content: All these other points are meaningless if your writing is just bad. Good writing is not necessarily about paragraph or sentence length, bullet points, headers and images; good writing is about great ideas and compelling delivery.
B) Use Bucket Brigades to Pique Interest
Originally, a “bucket brigade” was a chain of people who pass buckets of water from person to person to extinguish a fire. Now it’s a copywriting technique designed to capture a reader’s interest and then keep them reading the rest of your page (reducing bounce rate), much like the flow of the bucket being passed down the line.
It essentially involves breaking an idea into multiple sentences, using a trigger word or חברת ×§×™×“×•× × ×ª×¨×™× ×•×•×‘×¡ phrase, and then ending the sentence with a colon to pique interest. Look at this example from Copyhackers:
bucket brigade example - copyhackers
Fancy putting this into practice? Here are a handful of bucket brigades you can sprinkle throughout your content:
You might be wondering:
The answer is:
You’re probably thinking:
Here’s the deal:
It gets better:
C) Write in the Inverted Pyramid Style
If you went to journalism school, you know all about the inverted pyramid style of writing:
Effective SEO Techniques that Work in 2017
This method means giving away the most valuable information at the top of the article, and following it up with less important information. If readers tend to scan and rarely make it to the bottom of an article, it makes sense to give them what they want as soon as they land on the page.
D) Analyze (and Improve) Current Page Designs
More often than not, high bounce rates result from poor usability and an awkward user experience (UX). However, it’s tough to figure out where pesky UX problems are an issue because they can vary dramatically from site to site.
Here are five user-testing tools you can use to analyze how people are interacting with your website – and spark ideas for improvement:
Crazy Egg
Clever and intuitive, Crazy Egg helps subscribers rate and understand user experience with their rich visual aids like heatmaps, scrollmaps, confetti, and overlays. Each of these are graphic representations of one aspect of UX.
For instance: Heat maps are ×§×™×“×•× × ×•×¨×’× ×™ וובס colorful representations of where users have clicked on your site, while scrollmaps show you just how far down the page your users scroll before leaving.
With this data, it’s possible to figure out what your best design features (or flaws) are, and correct them accordingly. On Crazy Egg’s home page, they’ve included an example of a heatmap of their own site which shows where their visitors clicked:
Effective SEO Techniques that Work in 2017
Optimizely
Optimizely, the world’s leading experimentation platform, specializes in A/B testing—a scientific, data-driven way to test websites for maximum usability and engagement. In A/B testing, multiple versions of a web page are randomly shown to users, compared against a control page (generally the existing website), and then analyzed for effect.
The biggest advantage of a proper A/B testing process is that marketers can understand how even the tiniest changes can positively affect their website, such as:
Moving the “buy” button to the left
Changing button colors from red to blue
Switching headline text from “download now” to “get your free e-book”
Many A/B tests can have surprising results. For example, Michael Aagaard from ContentVerve found that moving the CTA to the bottom of the page actually increased conversions by 304%, compared to placing the CTA above the fold (which goes against most SEO best practices):
AB testing
The genius of Optimizely is that it massively simplifies something that would otherwise require a team of dedicated, experienced UX designers and researchers to carry out.
Google Optimize
Along the same lines, Optimize by Google Analytics also assists marketers improve and maximize customer engagement and conversion. As a free version of its Optimize 360 program, Google’s Optimize is a streamlined, user-friendly software that simplifies A/B testing and includes advanced modeling to improve engagement and targeted experiences.
But perhaps the biggest draw of Optimize is that it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, allowing marketers to further leverage their existing resources. With Optimize, marketers can use existing Analytics metrics as a starting point, which allows them to rely on a familiar interface as they move on to deeper and more complicated experiments.
Here’s a shot of the Google Optimize user screen. Notice that it gives recommendations and suggestions for the optimal interface:
Google optimize
User Testing
While Google Optimize and Optimizely are essentially DIY UX tools for marketers and small business owners, User Testing is far more specialized.
They say users can “capture the critical human insights you need to confidently deliver what customers want and expect”. And, in its most basic form, User Testing is more of a pure research tool—gathering commentary from target audiences and offering marketers detailed videos of user interaction and behavior.
UserTesting understand
Don’t Make Me Think
The above four tools are some of the best UX testing programs available today. Yet one of the best UX resources isn’t digital, but rather a book: Don’t Make Me Think, a groundbreaking work by UX designer Steve Krug that has sold 100,000 copies over five years.
With its conversational tone and engaging manner, Krug’s work gets readers into the habit of critically examining and rethinking everything about their websites, including even the tiniest details, like misplaced buttons or unwieldy site maps.
Effective SEO Techniques that Work in 2017
ClickFlow
ClickFlow is a tool we built to help companies increase organic traffic without more backlinks or posting more content.
Through ClickFlow, companies can automatically see which pages on their site have the most potential to grow revenues, such as pages that have high impression count in search but a low click through rate. Using that information, ClickFlow will keep track of headline tests to help grow your click-throughs from search terms you already rank for.
The tool drives up your bottom line by showing you how much revenue you’ve gained and how much you stand to gain. It’s been used by companies like LeadPages, Drip, The Atlantic, and more.
SEO Experimentation Tool – ClickFlow
Click here to download it for free right now!
We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies, venture backed startups and companies like yours grow revenues faster. Get A Free Consultation
E) Site Speed
Back in 2010, Google announced that it would be using site speed as a ranking factor. Fast forward almost a decade and now Google has consistently emphasized the importance of site speed:
Google Webmasters tweet
Site speed plays a huge role in SEO because people don’t want to wait years to access information they’re searching for.
That’s why Google has launched a number of SEO tools to help improve site speed, including:
PageSpeed Insights to help developers improve site performance
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to boost speed on mobile sites
Think with Google to help gauge how responsive (or mobile-friendly) a site is, which includes speed as a parameter.
Clearly, Google wants your website to load faster than it is right now. But how fast?
Maile Oyhe, former Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, said:
Google page speed
You should improve your site’s speed not only to work your way up Google’s rankings, but also to increase conversions. One survey found that nearly 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance won’t return to the site to buy again – which could see you losing out on a ton of conversion-rich search traffic who are ready to hand over their hard-earned cash for your product or service.
Article Source:
https://www.singlegrain.com/search-engine-optimization/effective-seo-techniques-that-work/
