When it comes to search engine optimization or SEO it can often feel like you’re at war with an enemy that has a constantly upgrading arsenal and you’re left still fighting with sticks. It’s a fast-paced and ever-changing field where what works great one day may actually harm another. Keeping up with the trends and techniques that work best is a full-time job.
Top notch digital marketing companies like SEO Vendor not only provides custom services that are specifically designed to get you to the top of the rankings, they also like to explain how it works and why you need it. So with that in mind here are 5 techniques that will help you always come out on top.
1. Quantity Over Quality
We don’t mean that literally, however, there is no denying that a larger word count will help you get further up when competing against other pages on the same topic. If you look at the average length of a top spot, first page Google piece of content it usually hits the 1,800 mark.
Now a lot of us have it ingrained into us that anything over 500/750 words will not get read, that the internet has no attention span for that; which may be true. Even the best writer in the world may lose the audience over a piece of that length in this click-hungry environment, that doesn’t stop the technique being incredibly effective at channeling people into your site by making sure you’re the first one that comes up given a niche or specific search.
2. Recycle and Re-use
Instead of tirelessly pumping out new article after article here’s a helpful hint: you don’t have to do that. As long as your website is being updated and your social channels, backlinks, and connections to your core community are active and pumping blood you will still be climbing that ladder.
A technique that we’ve used to great effect is repurposing old content to then republish and relaunch it. For starters there are many potential readers who may have missed the content the first time around; for dessert, there’s the new information, examples, stories, or just the fresh edit that you are able to improve the content with.
3. Learn from the Best
It has and always will be ultimately all about keywords, knowing which ones to target and how to employ techniques to do that. Luckily for us, though there are plenty of other websites out there already targeting much the same audience as we will be and so we can learn from them.
Check out the domain of a site that is performing particularly well for the search terms you’d most expect your own audience to be looking for. Pop your chosen sensei site into a tool such as Moz or SEMRush and you’ll have a list of great keywords to be targeted.
4. Be Semantic
SEO isn’t as rigid as it once may have been, the algorithms have evolved and improved. Google doesn’t just rank you for the specific keywords you target and use in your content, it will now “read” the copy to understand the topic in general. This is part of the Semantic Search system and you can use this to great effect.
Using a tool like LSIgraph you can find all of the sub-topics associated with a given keyword and then find ways to work them into your content to make sure Google “understands” what it is about and affords it the appropriate ranking.
5. Rankbrain Teasers
We looked at Google Rankbrain in a little more depth in a previous blog entry because it has become a game changer when it comes to SEO. Rankbrain is a machine learning algorithm that has quickly established itself as one of the most important factors when it comes to page ranking. It will continue to evolve, improve and shift its priorities with a focus on searcher satisfaction.
What does this mean? It means if you rank on the first page but don’t convert that to clicks, you will drop. It means eye catchy and great content will prevail, and less so the hacky keyword jammed nonsense that reigned supreme for a while.
Oh also numbers, for some reason numbers have and always will get you more clicks than content and there’s research to prove it; so make sure you work the numbers.
