Transform Your SEO Ranking: Insights from Industry-Leading SEO Resellers and Digital Marketing Agencies

Intro

In 2024, investing in search engine optimization (SEO) for your brand is more than just a necessity, it is a priority. SEO optimizes your website’s visibility thereby increasing your chances of your site ranking on the first page of search engine results.

When you invest in SEO, it makes it easier for your customers, both current and potential, to find you online and it provides long-term brand equity.

As an industry-leading SEO reseller, we have compiled a list of 15 techniques on how to transform your SEO and create an effective SEO strategy in 2024. Let’s get into it.

What Does SEO Mean?

SEO is a strategy that is used to increase the positioning of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs). These steps aim to improve a website’s visibility, ensure it ranks higher than its competitors, reaches its target audience quickly and leads to more organic traffic to the website or blog section.

Users enter keywords and phrases when they search for answers to questions they need answers to or to learn more about a particular subject. As a result, the search engine will provide links to a piece of content that it believes will meet the needs of the user based on their query. Thus, basic SEO can help a website’s content appear in those query results and reach the intended audience.

There are three (3) macro areas of SEO, which are;

* On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves optimizing web pages on your site and their content for search engines and users. It helps web pages rank higher on Google and also drives organic traffic to a website.

The common tasks that are associated with on-page SEO are optimizing for search intent, title tags, internal links and URLs.

* Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, encompasses activities that are done outside of a website (or externally) to increase the site’s search engine rankings.

These activities will typically include building backlinks, encouraging branded searches, and increasing engagement and shares on social media.

* Technical SEO

Technical SEO ensures that the website meets the technical requirements of search engines and its goal is to improve your rankings. The important elements include crawling, indexing, rendering, page speed, and website architecture.

What Is SEO Ranking?

SEO ranking is when a webpage or blog post appears on the search engine results page in response to the user’s query. A variety of ranking factors are used by a search engine algorithm to determine rankings on SERPs, namely content relevance, backlink quality, readability and more.

A higher SEO ranking ensures that it is easily found by users who will then click through to the website or blog. The more traffic funneled through to a website, the increased chances of the visitors being converted into paying customers.

Improve Your SEO Optimization Ranking Using These 15 Techniques

So, to improve SEO ranking, these are the steps you can take;

1. Prioritize the user experience

One of the most important factors of a successful SEO strategy is user experience. Google is paying close attention to how content is produced on websites and how it is delivered to users.

This is because if the content is robotic and is crafted to please search engines, chances are high that it will not rank. Every content should be naturally crafted from person to person, offering something that users are searching for and want to read.

Google’s latest algorithm created in 2021 focuses on the user’s experience on the web pages and all updates are based on this Google algorithm.

2. Always analyze data

An essential part of an SEO strategy is analyzing data. This data can be used as a basis for the creation of your organic acquisition strategy.

Things you will need to pay attention to are data on traffic and the number of visits to each blog post. You need to know which pages do not make sense on your website and either revise them or remove them. Conduct content pruning or optimize the content that is not receiving a lot of traffic.

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Your organic acquisition of customers will be made better by organizing and acting on the SEO data. One way to efficiently gather and organize SEO data is by using a web scraping API. This tool can help you automate the process and provide you with the most relevant and up-to-date information.

3. Create high-quality content that is relevant to your audience

Content is your top driver of higher SERP rankings. As such, your focus should be on crafting content that is fresh, of high quality and authoritative and is intentionally geared towards your intended audience.

Such content will increase traffic to your website or blog, boosting your site’s relevance and authority. This will be recognised by search engines and it will move your website up in rankings. For example, if you’re a dental service, writing high-quality content about dental care or addressing concerns could drive decent traffic to your site. Or let’s say in the financial service niche instead, writing about loans, insurance, or mutual funds could be beneficial.

The strategies that will help you in writing content that is valuable to your intended audience include;

• Developing content around a keyword phrase that your target audience frequently searches on.
• Creating content using related keywords and phrases to the most searched queries. They can be found under the “Searches related to” section of the Google results page.
• Building your content around low-competition keyword phrases that you can find in the “People also ask” sections on SERPs.

4. Revisit older content and update and optimize where needed

Do not forget about the content that already exists on your website. A quick way to improve the relevancy of your website is to update and optimize your content that already exists. Begin with a content audit that will help in identifying what you need to focus on first.

Evaluate your existing content for targeted keywords even if it may be still beneficial and does not need revising. You must also check for any images, infographics or videos that need updating.

Additionally, you need to ensure that your updated content is indexed by Google by going to Google Search Console entering the URL of the updated content and clicking the “Request Indexing” button.

5. Increase your website’s readability

Increasing your content’s readability will impress your audience and search engine algorithms.

Readability is a tool that is used to determine how easy your content is to read. Text legibility, complexity and formatting are elements used in the measurement of readability. Moreover, a critical trait of readable content is that it must also be scannable.

You can use the Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch Reading Ease formulas to measure your content’s readability. You can also find help online from SEO tools such as Yoast SEO, SEMRush, Readable, Grammarly and Hemmingway.

The reader’s experience is improved by readability while also signaling to search engines that your content is of higher quality according to the number of readers. All of this can help boost your SEO rankings.

6. Create a robust linking strategy

A key component of your SEO success that needs to also include plans for both internal and external links is your linking strategy.

You must link to external authoritative, relevant and reputable sources within your content. Doing this increases your credibility and authority and these are two factors that search engine algorithms pick up on.

Your anchor texts for your links must be descriptive and ensure that you use your targeted keywords or phrases whenever possible.

Inbound links or backlinks are favorable to your SEO efforts. They are links that happen when another website links back to your site. So, To gain inbound links, create high-quality, shareable content and look for opportunities to guest post. Alternatively, you can hire a dedicated link-building agency like OnlyLinkbuilding or Fig Advertising to manage the work for you.

Google views inbound links as another pointer to your website containing quality content and will take your website more seriously. You do not need a lot of inbound links as search engines are interested in the quality of each more than how many you have on your website.

7. Check for broken links regularly

Regularly check your inbound and outbound links to ensure they are working properly to improve your user experience even more. You might find that there is an inbound link from another website that’s broken or an external link in your content is not working as it should.

Broken links will annoy your readers, reduce their trust and affect dwell time, resulting in an increased bounce rate. Moreover, broken links will create an impression amongst your visitors that your website is outdated, unattended or inactive. The user experience and your SEO ranking can be affected by all of these issues.

8. Vary your SEO content types

You can attract a wider audience and increase traffic to your website by offering different SEO content types. This can also boost your dwell time (especially testimonials), resulting in visitors spending more time on your site, directly impacting your SEO ranking.

Consider your existing content on your website if you are unsure of where to start. How can you repurpose some of your content into another format? Like converting a popular video into an informative blog post or vice versa, for example.

These content types are beneficial to SEO:

• How-to guides.
• Authoritative blog posts.
• Long-form content.
• Detailed lists/listicles.
• Videos.
• Interactive content.
• Infographics.

1. Strive for the feature snippet

Snippets are what Google places at the top of search engine results as a way to provide a partial or full answer to a specific query. A featured snippet is taken from one of the top 10 results that appear on that first page.

So, you must strive for your content to be the featured snippet to do so, you need to conduct keyword research to find a keyword phrase that you are ranking for on a SERP.

Check out the featured snippet that appears on the results page and take note of its structure, which will typically be a definition, list or table.

From there, you must examine your ranking content and ensure you have formatted it to fit into one of the snippet format types.

To strive for a list-based snippet, for example, you need to use consistent subheadings (H2, H3s) with descriptive phrases for each section

9. Add alt tags

Include alt tags for every video and image on your website or blog. Alt tags help search engines understand what that image is and how to index it appropriately.

The initial use of alt tag is to describe the image(s) for visitors who cannot see them and it is also what is shown when an image, for some reason, fails to load.

Be as specific as possible in your description to increase the effectiveness of these tags. Also, keep them short, include your keyword or phrase and be unique.

10. Include meta titles and meta descriptions

To help search engines gain a clearer understanding of your content and entice viewers to click over to your website, you need to include meta titles and meta descriptions.

Ensure that each one is unique, short and descriptive and it must include your most important keyword or phrase.

Meta titles and meta descriptions have a less direct impact on your SEO, but they can boost user engagement with your content and website, making them an indirect SEO factor.

11. Consider adding an FAQs section

Additional questions and interests will arise when a person learns more about a topic or subject. And it is impossible for all of these potential questions and the related interests in the content to be addressed in just one webpage, article or blog post.

If you can anticipate what these additional questions and interests are, you will be able to benefit your SEO by adding a FAQs section at the bottom of the page that uses long-tail keywords. Search engines, with these included, can recognise the long-tail keywords and you will rank when users are searching on those topics as well.

12. If relevant, concentrate on improving your local SEO

If your website serves a specific geographic area, then local SEO is essential as it will assist your website in appearing at the top of local search results.

In local SEO, the chief goal is to rank in what is called the “Local Pack”, which is a pack of three local businesses that show up at the top of SERPs, along with a Google map.

Here are a few tips to remember to help you optimize your local SEO and boost your chances of ranking higher;

• Create or claim your Google My Business Profile and optimize it.
• Ensure you have a consistent online directory citation, that is name, contact information, etc across the web.
• Optimize your website and blog content for local keywords.
• Reply to Customer Reviews.

13. Make your website more mobile-friendly

A lot more people are conducting searches on mobile devices, so you must make sure your website is mobile-friendly. It will provide a better user experience for your target audience and also positively affect your mobile SEO.

Mobile-first indexing is now being used by Google, meaning that the organic search engine’s algorithms are focused primarily on how your content is displayed for mobile devices. They then use this to index and rank your pages.

14. Monitor webpage loading speeds

Your visitors and Google rankings will be impacted if your webpage loading speed is overly slow. Your visitors will most likely abandon your website and this is something Google will notice.

In other words, your rankings are directly and indirectly impacted by how slow or fast your website loads. So, you will need to monitor and test the speed of your web pages and improve those pages that prove to be slow.

Reducing the file size of your website, compressing images on your site and re-evaluating any plug-ins and themes are things that can help speed up load times.