Ranking in the No. 1 position on Google is the goal of all online marketers, businesses, and bloggers. That is because a first-place ranking means more traffic and subsequently more sales. Even if your conversions are awful, the number of unique visitors that you can receive(depending on your keyword)will more than compensate for it.
It’s for these reasons that marketers continuously search high and low for the most up-to-date and useful SEO strategies to rank high in Google. And though Google, being the brilliant innovator that it is, offers a multitude of tools, guides, training programs to assist with SEO, there’s always a handful of additional “SEO Hacks” that you can implement to increase chances of ranking faster.
Find Your Best-Performing Content
If you have a website that you’re looking to rank on Google, you should list your site in the Google Search Console. Not only is this where you’ll index your site for Google to crawl, but you can set up various tools to help with SEO and site optimization. After you go to the “Search Traffic” tab to view your stats, notice what pages on your website are ranking the highest and have the most visitors. Make sure that the pages are ones that are sales converters such as landing pages, interviews/podcasts, product/shop pages, service pages, or ones that are content-centered.
Next, analyze each URL to determine which keyword search terms(“Queries”) are bringing in the most traffic for the page. Narrow the list down to the top ten keywords. Now that you know where most of your website’s traffic is coming from, you’re off to the races!
Showcase Your Best Work
Once you have your list of high-ranking keyword search terms and pages, make sure that you fully optimize each page with those keywords(and variations of them) on the webpage. That means assuring that it’s in the metadata, title tag, content (at a 2% to 5% density), file names, image alt titles, etc. Also, if you feel that the material could be better, don’t be afraid to beef it up. Remember, the longer the content, the more times you’re able to utilize your keyword-without getting hit with a keyword-stuffing penalty from Google, that is.
For example, if you craft a 1,780-word post on Mazda engines, you now have 89 times (5% density) that you can add the keyword to your post without it looking spammy, as opposed to a 500-word post where your 5% density would be 25. Though several other factors contribute to high rankings, note that long-form content is always a plus. Find ways to add variations of related keywords into your content. If you’re having trouble making a list, go to Google Analytics to find associated keywords (click the “related keywords” tab) and try to come up with five to 10 additional related terms for each of your keywords.
Analyze the Top of the Funnel
Most large corporations have the resources to hire expensive marketing and research teams to help them analyze consumer trends and buying processes, but what about the little guys? How can site owners with smaller budgets gather consumer data to improve their SEO strategies? They must know these two words: Google Correlate. A few years back, Google introduced Google Correlate, which is a tool that allows you to reverse-engineer search queries related to your website. It provides you with trend data taken from their search analytics and illustrates search trends for any data set that you enter.
To break it down a bit, say that you sell refrigerators online. With Google Correlate you may enter something like”new refrigerators”into the data tab. Google Correlate will then provide a list of search terms (with dates) showing queries related to this. Some related queries may be things like “how to fix a refrigerator” or “where to buy a quality refrigerator.” If you get where this is going, that’s great, because it gets even better.
Not only can you search for related queries, but you can gather more detailed data by entering a specific time to see what people are searching for even before (or after) they search for your main keywords. Using the previous example, say you wanted to gain insight into the length of time it takes consumers to buy a refrigerator. You can enter “-1, -2, -3, -4, etc.” (which corresponds to the number of weeks before or after) into Google Correlator and it’ll show you how many weeks prior to searching for “new refrigerators” that online users searched for the “how to fix a refrigerator” and “where to buy quality a refrigerator” terms. How valuable is that info? It’s super valuable for a marketer. Imagine the campaigns you can create with this sort of data.
You can probably think of countless other ways that you can utilize search trends to optimize your website. Remember that Google’s number-one focus is to direct searchers to the most relevant and useful content, and the more relevant your site appears, the higher you’ll rank. Keyword research and list-building should be a constant part of your SEO strategy, but it’s also extremely beneficial to take advantage of any low-hanging fruit that your website offers.
