When looking to improve your search engine rankings and outrank your competitors, these SEO tips are for you! There’s no secret that building a quality SEO strategy can be a long and difficult process, but in the world of ecommerce, visibility is everything and an SEO strategy can make or break your business.
Think of search engine optimization as a competition. You are constantly battling other businesses for a coveted position on the first page of Google. Think about how often do you search beyond the first page of Google when looking for a particular product. Not too often, right? In fact, the average consumer won’t even click beyond the first five listings on a search engine results page (SERP). If your competitors outrank you, they could be stealing away a huge portion of your potential customers!
Here are 10 effective SEO tips to help you outrank your competitors no matter what industry you’re in.
1. Start with Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step to any successful SEO strategy. What words or phrases do you want your website or a piece of content to show up for when people search for them on Google? These words or phrases will be your keywords.
Improving your search engine rankings isn’t just about getting more website visitors. It’s also about getting the right kinds of visitors. The best way to get the most relevant visitors to your site is to plan your SEO strategy based on the most relevant keywords.
When considering which keywords you want to rank for, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions: Will people using these search queries find what they are looking for on my website? Will the searchers be satisfied when they land on my site? Do I have anything to gain from generating search traffic to my website from people searching for this keyword? If the answer is yes to all these questions, you’re on the right track!
Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console and Moz Keyword Explorer are great SEO tools designed to help you estimate which keywords will be most effective to reach your customers in organic searches. One thing to keep in mind when conducting keyword research is to consider search terms that are relevant to voice search or talk-to-type phrases. Google voice search is becoming increasingly important with the rise of talk-to-text functions on smartphones. As well, another great SEO tactic is to consider common misspellings of potential keywords because people make mistakes. And you don’t want to miss out on a customer just because they spelled your keyword wrong.
So how do you use keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner? This tool is available to anybody with a Google Ads account and allows you to simply type in any word, phrase, or URL related to your business and be able to see a list of related keywords and metrics for those keywords. Metrics include search volume (average number of monthly searches) and competition level this means; how easy or difficult it will be to outrank competitors for that keyword. If you’re not sure where to start in terms of testing out keywords, think of it this way: what word or phrase would somebody type in to find your website?
In theory, each page of your website or post on your blog should target one specific main keyword or topic. However, avoid using the same target keyword on multiple pages of your site. Google will only choose to rank one of these pages, so you may be wasting your time if multiple pages on your site are aiming to rank for the same keyword, especially since Google may not rank the one you want!
2. Optimize your site for keywords
One time you’ve settled on which keywords you want your site to compete for in Google ranking, it’s time to optimize your website accordingly and take it up a notch with your page SEO efforts. Make sure your keywords appear as frequently as possible on your website (or at least on the page of your website you wish to rank for that keyword). The desired keyword should appear in page titles, headers, alt texts, URLs, file names, and meta tags. Keywords should be provided in both the source code and existing content on the page you’re trying to have rank.
Another one of our SEO tips is to have a multi-page website. Single page websites are easy to build, but when looking to improve your search engine results, a multi-page website is the way to go! The more pages you have on your website, the more chances you have to optimize your site. Anyhow, ensure that you won’t settle for duplicate content just to have multiple pages.
3. Write New, Engaging Content Based on Keywords
Every page of your website can be leveraged to improve your search engine rankings as long as you build them up with great content based on your predetermined keywords. This includes product pages, blog posts or even FAQ pages and directories. Filling your website with quality content is one of the single most important SEO tips. Having a blog on your website is one of the easiest ways to incorporate your keywords into your website, along with internal links which we will get into in more detail afterwards.
There are lots of types of content that you can create for your website. There’s the usual article, video, infographic and more. Never forget to write for people rather than search engines. For sure, you want your keywords to appear as many times as possible on a blog post, but it still has to make sense and offer something of value to your readers. It can become incredibly obvious to your website visitors if your site is designed exclusively to improve search engine rankings. You should always keep in mind that there are real people looking at your website, and your goal is to appeal to them. Google has been known to penalize websites that are caught producing low-value content for the sake of SEO. Search engines like Google and Bing catch on pretty quickly when your website’s bounce rate is high and conversion rate is low.
4. Utilize Internal links
To make greater the number of internal links on your website is one of the simplest ranking factors you can implement to grow your SEO strategy, and of course, organic traffic. All you have to do is link out to pages you want to improve the ranking for on various other pages of your site. You may want to go back and edit old blog posts to contain internal links to other blog posts or pages on your website.
Internal linking aides in website navigation and can potentially improve a website’s domain authority and ranking power. The more pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you will have to add internal links. So get blogging, and post new blogs regularly.
Always make sure your links are relevant. Don’t link simply for the sake of linking. Connecting two pages of your site through internal hyperlinks has to make sense and add value for your website visitors. You can use long-tail keywords as anchor texts to better increase their click-through rate (CTR). Finally, don’t forget to always check for any broken links on your website.
5. Grow Your Backlinks
In addition to loading your website up with internal links, one of the more important SEO tips is to maximize your external links. The more often a page on your site is linked out to on other websites, the better it looks to Google. You may have to ask other website owners to link to your site. Watch out! There are a few backlink gathering strategies that go against Google’s webmaster guidelines, like donating to charities and nonprofits for a backlink.
Quality over quantity is important to reach when it comes to link building. A few high authority links like those coming from guest posting will do you much better than a lot of low-quality links.
The best SEO tips we have for gaining backlinks are to reach out to influencers or bloggers, submit a guest post and request for them to link out to your website on their posts. Or you can simply create high quality, engaging content that people will want to link out to from their own sites naturally.
6. Streamline Your Load Time
It is a proven fact that the speed at which your webpage loads affects its SEO, even digital marketing in general. If your website is loading slow, all your other SEO strategies could be in vain. Preferably, your website and landing pages should load in three seconds or less. A low page speed can also lead to a high bounce rate, which can hurt your search engine rankings even more.
To increase your load speed, consider removing any unnecessary multimedia, widgets, or plugins. You should also minify any CSS, HTML, and/or JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes. If your website still loads slowly, consider upgrading your web host. Enabling browser caching, utilizing a CDN, and minimizing HTTP requests are a few more SEO tips to streamline your load time.
7. Equip Your Site with Breadcrumbs
While you’re improving your website to make it easier for search engines to comb, consider adding breadcrumbs. We’re not talking about actual crumbs of bread. When it comes to web design, breadcrumbs are navigational aids that help people and search engines navigate your site and therefore easier to use.
Breadcrumbs can show up when somebody runs a Google search and finds your website, showing users exactly where on your site they are clicking to. Each of the breadcrumbs are clickable, as well.
Different types of breadcrumbs are to your choice that can be utilized for your site, but hierarchy breadcrumbs are the most common. These breadcrumbs show users where they are in terms of your site structure and how many clicks it will take to get back to the homepage. The image below shows an example of a typical hierarchy based breadcrumb structure might look like:
There are also attribute based breadcrumbs which show up once a certain search or selection has been made. History-based breadcrumbs show you where you are on a site based on the history of other pages you have clicked on the site to get there.
Breadcrumbs increase the user experience of your site by making it easier to navigate, and they can also help Google learn how your website is structured for SEO. Plugins like Yoast SEO make breadcrumbs super easy to install on your site.
8. Use Meta Descriptions
One of the most important yet frequently forgotten SEO tips is to optimize your meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are the first thing people see when your page appears on their Google search. Think of it this way – your page title is for search engines while your meta description is for the users. It’s your first and direct way to tell users what this page is all about. It’s your chance to entice them to click your link and visit your website. So be sure to use the characters in your meta description wisely.
If your website is built on WordPress, the previously mentioned Yoast SEO plugin can make editing your meta descriptions a breeze! Yoast SEO will show you a page analysis as well as a preview of how your title tag and meta description will appear on Google.
Making sure your keywords appear within the meta description can give your rankings a big boost.
9. Social Signals
Plenty of case studies have proven that social shares and social media engagement such as likes, re-tweets, and Pinterest pins improve search engine rankings.
So how do you increase your site’s social signals? For beginers, fill your website with engaging content that is easily shareable. You can add share buttons to your blog posts to make them that much easier for readers to share on social media. You can even directly ask social media users and influencers to share your articles.
Unneeded to say, you should be frequently sharing content from your website on your business’s social channels. Ideally, one third of all content posted on your business’s social media should link back to the site. And although links from social media are ‘no-follow’ which means they don’t have the direct impact on your rankings, you can still drive some traffic by linking your website content to your social media posts.
10. Check Out Your Competitors’ Domain Authority
All websites have a domain authority, which is a number between 1 and 100. Domain Authority, also known as DA, is a search engine ranking score designed to predict how a website will rank on SERPs. A higher score, that is a score closer to 100, denotes a greater ability to rank, while a lower score means a website will be less likely to rank well. Every website starts out with a domain authority of one and improves their DA through many different metrics including the number of internal and external links, social signals, search engine friendliness, and the quality of the site’s content.
With this useful extension called MozBar that will allow you to easily see a site’s domain authority. Using MozBar, you can find out the Domain Authority of your competitors to learn how much you have to improve your domain authority by to outrank them.
11. Hire an SEO Expert
Overwhelmed trying to implement all these SEO tips, especially the technical SEO tactics, by yourself? Never fear, the experts are here!
SEO is a constantly evolving field, and it can be a full-time job trying to keep up with all the changes. The good news is, there are SEO specialists out there whose entire job is actually based around keeping up with these changes and learning how to implement them to help business owners like you!
Hiring somebody to take care of your SEO may seem like a big expense at first, but it can save you a lot of money overtime. An expertly coordinated SEO strategy can also earn you a great deal of revenue in the long run when you begin to outrank your competitors!
