SEO is one of the most climbable channels for driving targeted traffic to your website. That’s good news for us. The bad? It can be so complicated.
Google’s algorithm uses many factors to determine its rankings. Which makes things mainly complicated. Compounding the difficulty of developing an SEO strategy, Google’s constantly changing its algorithm.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know every Google ranking factor to rank higher on the SERP. In fact, there are several actionable SEO and digital marketing strategies you can use that are effective over the short and long term.
In this post, we’ll show you how to enhance your Google search ranking. Specifically, we’ll outline seven actionable SEO techniques that you can implement in hours or days and not weeks or months.
- Use Original Images For Blog Content
It’s no secret that multimedia, like infographics, and screenshots, embedded videos, can enhance your SEO strategy and make your content more engaging and interesting.
That said, Google may also prefer to rank pages with original multimedia.
One set of pages used completely original images taken for the team. While others used publicly available stock images. To reduce the influence of other potential factors, the Reboot online team i.e. launched completely new websites from scratch. That way, they could attempt to separate the impact of original images on Google rankings.
Interestingly, they discovered that pages using original images often outranked those with stock photos.
Or as the experimenters with “Surprisingly it is clear-cut results.”
- Write Original Meta Tags
Meta Tags are an element of on-page content optimization with many people overlook.
That’s likely because meta tags are a little bit old school compared to more recent on-page SEO strategies like Core Web Vitals as well as semantic SEO. And Google often rewrites SERPs.
The upshot is that meta tags are highly relevant. Specifically, well-written meta tags can improve your site’s organic known as Click through Rate(CTR).
In some cases, improving your CTR can also lead to significantly more organic traffic without needing to rank higher on Google.
While your title tag mainly plays a role in CTR, your description tag is very important. That’s because users will read it to determine if your site is a good & fit for their query.
- Try To Break Link Building
With no SEO strategies list, it would be complete without mentioning link building.
That’s because backlinks are still strongly correlated with the best Google rankings. And building the best backlinks can significantly improve Google rankings.
“Great content” and of course “build relationships” are the cornerstones of earning backlinks to your site. While both tactics are important, neither is instantly actionable.
Fortunately, there is an actionable tactic that you can also use to encourage other blogs in your niche to link to you: broken link building. Here’s the scoop that how you can use it for your own site
Find a page, tool, or resource in your niche that’s broken or may be outdated.
The folks from Exploding Topics realized that an old Google search engine known as Google Correlate had been shut down.
- It Improves Your Page’s Dwell Time
Google’s recently updated i.e. How search works document confirms, the company uses “aggregated and also anonymized interaction with data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries.”
In other words, Google measures how users interact with the search results. And it takes these user interaction signals into account when it comes across the Google rankings. These engagements can include bounce rate pages per visit etc.
One of the most interactive signals Google pays close attention to is Dwell time. Dwell time is essentially how long time someone spends on a webpage.
A page with a high dwell time suggests to Google that the page a high-quality, relevant results.
Here are a few points to boost your website’s dwell time:
- Add “you may also like” with links
- Also, write crisp introductions.
- Makes your own content “skimmable”.
- Boost Up The Underperforming Pages
If your site has been around when you probably have a few pages that aren’t performing as well as they should. And you’ll have pages that used to rank but also have started to decline.
Identifying and fixing these pages is one of the fastest ways to improve your Google keyword rankings. Especially when you consider a brand-new piece of content that can take five to ten hours to draft, write, edit, and publish. On the other hand, you need to improving and updating an underperforming page may only take 30 minutes to an hour.
First of all, find the underperforming pages. With a top organic pages tool, you can evaluate the best performance of an individual website by examining its traffic share and traffic trends, with the number of keywords driving traffic to the page, as well as the top keyword driving traffic to the page.
- Just Turn Unlinked Brand Mentions Into Backlinks
An unlinked brand mention is when someone mentions your own brand without a link back to your site.
It’s possible that Google uses unlinked brand mentions as a great ranking signal. Even so, it’s preferable to turn that unlinked with mention into a backlink.
Fortunately, getting links from the best writers that have mentioned your brand is relatively easy (because they’ve already mentioned you!). So it’s just a matter of sending a friendly reminder to add a link to your own site.
Both of these track brand mentions around the web and also have filters for specifically identifying brand mentions without a link.
Then, it’s a matter of reaching out to the article’s author to remind them to add a link.
The key here is to make the main purpose of the email to thank the writer for their mention. Then, casually mention that a link could like “help their readers find us”.
- Discover Low-Competition Keywords In Online Communities
SEO is becoming much more competitive.
This means keywords that used to be relatively easy to rank for are now a fight for the 1 position. Fortunately, there are still millions of untapped keywords out there but if you know where to look.
Specifically, online communities are fantastic places to uncover untapped search terms like keywords research tools haven’t picked up on yet.
Another way to implement this strategy is to just search for a keyword in Google. Then, check out the “people also ask…” section for the search results.
Conclusion
SEO is a continuous process involving almost every aspect of digital marketing (including content, partnerships, design, PR, and more). We hope these tactical strategies helped to show you how to rank higher on Google.
Many of these initiatives will take time and dedication to the team to pull off. But as you have seen in this article, there are plenty of actionable strategies with an individual or small team can pull off by themselves. Many of which don’t require a large investment of time or resources.
