Every year you should revisit your SEO strategies to ensure your website performs as well or better than before.
Growing your business means boosting organic traffic and rankings to attract new visitors and potential customers.
Let’s look at some ideas to get you started.
1. Focus on your Competitors
You can use information from your competitors to boost your SEO and website performance. Focusing on successful businesses within your sector will provide valuable data that can be directly applied to your SEO strategy.
· Analyse your competitors’ best-performing pages
Use a tool like Semrush organic research tool to identify your competitors’ best-performing pages.
Once you have gathered the data, you can search for patterns that make their best pages successful.
You can develop a strategy based on your fact-finding with information such as the length of posts, the number and type of images, and the kind of content.
· Use a keyword gap analysis tool
Keyword gap analysis will identify successful keywords for your competitors that you do not rank for.
Each gap is an opportunity for you to drive traffic to your page.
A keyword gap tool works by entering your domain against some of your competitors. The comparison will bring up a list of keywords that are missing from your site.
Simply use these keywords in your content to drive organic traffic to your website.
2. Optimise your links
Links are essential to successful SEO but are not always used well.
· Internal links for adding authority to underperforming pages
Internal links are links in your content that link to other relevant pages. Google uses them to identify your site’s hierarchy, and they help navigation and add authority as well as boost rankings.
Every website has pages stuck on page 2 that are not achieving the reach you want. You can boost them with internal links by searching your website’s content for relevant tags and adding a link to that page.
· Remove Bad Links
Some links will damage your SEO and your reputation.
Avoid buying links or using automated programs to create backlinks. Google will rate these links as spam, harming your rankings. For more information, see Google Guidelines.
· Use Digital PR
The best way to create backlinks is to use digital PR. Consider issuing press releases or creating valuable data.
One of the most effective ways of creating backlinks is to become a source. In the UK, you can register with Response Source, which connects the media and influencers to their needed resources.
· Search out Unlinked Brand Mentions
Use a tool to search for mentions of your brand across the web. Identify positive mentions and reach out to the business to request a link to be added to your name.
3. Focus on topics, not keywords
Usually, it is all about keywords when it comes to improving ranking, but let’s focus on topics for a change.
If you begin to organise your content into clusters of related material, you will create authority on a given topic.
Start with a pillar page that focuses on a topic you want to rank for and create cluster pages that relate to it. Use internal links for added navigation.
You can choose topics by searching for broad keywords relating to your industry.
4. Don’t neglect image SEO
Maximising the potential of images to attract more traffic from search engines is vital yet often neglected.
It is best to use an audit tool to check the performance of your images.
Optimising Image SEO includes:
- Descriptive file names and Alt text
- Improving speeds by compressing image size
- Creating a sitemap for images
- Including structured data
5. Research people also ask (PPA)
One of the most beneficial aspects of SERPS is the ‘People who ask’ (PAA) section. It shows searchers additional questions related to their original question or search.
The beauty of this section is that you can see for yourself the additional information that searchers are looking for. Including the answers to these questions will boost your rankings, increase your click rate and improve your brand awareness.
You can utilise PAA by including the answers in your content to rank in the PAA boxes. Try and include the following strategies:
- Start your post with a dictionary-style answer
- Include lists
- Include questions as subheaders
If your business needs help getting to the top of the search results page, get in touch with us at SEO and Web. Don’t let your competitors get there first!
