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earch engine marketing is becoming a chess tournament between you and search engine algorithm. Play a fare game, you try to cheat you lose battle.
Solid rock strategies to achieve high ranking in year 2017:
Understanding Keywords Matrices and trends:
Keywords Relevant keywords Add great value to your website. There will be drastic change in keywords targeting in coming days. As introduced Artificial Intelligence algorithmic change (RankBrain), and it started impacting ranking. It can understand semantics that means with time google algorithm will have more prominent improvement for semantic SEO.
As every year SEO is getting tougher. Because there are millions of new webpages added to search engine index directories. More websites simply means more competition. So chances to obtain variety and general keywords are very less. Also to rank for longer time of period is difficult. Therefore you need to understand the keyword matrix and then start making a solid roadmap to target related keywords.
There are so many detailed and interesting articles about keyword research and making good use of them to get high ranking on search engines, increasing organic traffic from Google. There are many observations and valuable advises in these articles. Here are some of them that I want to highlight and maybe very helpful for the year of 2017.
How to find keywords that can benefit your business?
As we start with tradition keyword research technique:
- We start with basic seed keywords (foundation keywords very specific to your niche, which will be used for making different keyword variations later).
- Make full list of keywords ideas with important keywords matrices like Search Volume, Keywords difficulty score and competition. You can use tools like Adwords Keywords Research, ahref’s Keywords Explorer to complete your keywords list.
During making keywords list make sure you are using relevant keywords because these keywords will be bringing traffic to your website. If you are using irrelevant keywords, that will useless for your profit.
And for search terms/pharases, higher difficulty score and competition higher the value lesser will be chances to get on the top ranking on Google.
After making complete list of keywords, here is the difficult part and that is which keywords should be targeted? So as per my experience you should start with checking baseline keyword ranking. You can check on Google console which of business related keywords are already ranking for your website. Prefer already ranked keywords and than if your website is new you should consider long tail keywords first as they have less competition as compare to shorter keywords.
For pre-existing website try to choose carefully by comparing pre-mentioned matrices and as I said higher the difficulty score and competition value higher the difficulty to rank keywords.
After finalizing keywords next step is to make prominent use of keywords:
- Use keywords in site urls
- Use keywords in titles and headings
- Use keywords In meta Title and descriptions
- Make use of keywords in body content
Market your Content:
Content has been always given high preference by all major search engines. But from recent years fresh and long-form content will continue to perform well in the search results. It’s true that creating highly intended and compiling content takes a lot of time and resources. But still spending money and efforts is definitely worth it for long term success. Right content provides solid foundation for other SEO efforts as well.
You need to make better strategy to create/craft content and then market it. You may consider some of these few tips for your next piece of content:
- Create right content and make it appealing: While creating content stick to some basic rules that is does not try to fool your users, just be honest and trustworthy with your audience. And try to make your content simple, clear, educational, relevant, informative, Inspiring or practice.
Style of content piece on your website depends upon what is main purpose of your website. For example, you are selling some product, dig up some creative product related stories and try to relate it socially and make an emotional connection with the reader, building that powerful and intangible goodwill for the brand. Try to dig into different audience to find strong connection between them and your brand.
- Check for keyword density and Prominence:
- Don’t try to overstuff your content with keywords.
- Make a proper use of keyword in your title.
- Create your content is structural manner so that it has hierarchy of headings and make use of keywords in headings.
- Make sure the keywords are making proper sense of the complete phrase.
- Make use of keyword variations and place them naturally in piece of content.
- Ensure the quality of your content: Leave no room for any error. Grammar is not a significant ranking factor but still content with typo, miss spellings and grammatical error is pointless. So before publishing your content proofread twice and get someone else for proofread as well.
- Time for some UX work: It’s time to think about color scheme, layout and media. All you need to add more prominent value with images, video and other info- graphics.
Once you have greater content ready for next stage now you can start thinking about marketing strategy. Here are some quick tips that will help you to grow your audience in 2017:
- Make e-mail list share new content to your e-mail list.
- Make proper use of social media.
- Reach out top related niche blogs, try to convince them to publish your content.
- Reach out people interested in your content via community sites and get proper feedback
- Let visitors share your idea. Make use of proper post sharing methods for users.
- Monitor different sites your content is on and try to dig out stats to understand top places, share more on these top places.
- Use paid ads and remarketing methods to gain more traffic.
Link Building Isn’t Dead! :
Well, some of you maybe not completely agree with this point but I think quality link building is no less important in 2017.
Improve your webpage Speed and Limit technical errors: You want Google show your WebPages on top of SERP list, better your pages should be so light and fast loading. As Google shifting towards Mobile 1st approach, webpages should load quickly i.e. under 2 seconds. You can check your website load speed for all devices from mobile to desktop browsers by verity of tools on internet like: Pingdom, Page speed insights, GTMatrix etc. Here are some quick and handy lists of factors that surely will improve your site load speed:
- Limit HTTP requests
- Limit/optimize java scripts and style sheets
- Limit/optimize images on site.
- Use client side validation for user inputs. Only use server side validation for security reasons.
- Make good use of compression techniques.
- Make good use of cloud hosting.
- Try incredibility of browser caching.
Always remember small performance improvement can have a big impact on traffic.
Focus more on Mobile and AMP:
Gain a strategic advantage from mobile users. If you have not started optimizing your website for mobile devices, i will simply advise you start optimizing. Mobile and tablet devices are resulting a great chunk of traffic continuously and there is been a continue rise in mobile users in recent 2-3 years. There was about 60% rise in year 2016 in mobile/ tablet traffic according to CISCO whitepapers.
You can create a specific version of website for mobile users or either a responsive layout website with mobile optimized component, choice is yours.
AMP is another project introduced by Google to provide better and effective web results for mobile. This forms a simple and lighter version of your website for mobile devices and loads quickly. You can say it’s optimized version of 3 basic components; AMP HTML, AMP JS and AMP cache.
Be social and interact with others:
Social media will be among top referral channels as its continuously trending and increasing vastly. Consumers are turning towards social media when the need anything new. They are searching about the business engagement, looking for easy support and product information on Facebook or twitter. There are various certain ways to turn social network sites into traffic machines. Generate top-quality content, interact with visitors and turn visitors into customers.
Voice Search is becoming more relevant:
Voice search is trending and having lots of buzz in SEO industry. Weather business should or should not consider optimizing website for voice search. Yeah global leaders are trying to make voice search results more relevant. You probably should consider voice search. As google study says about 40% of adults among total Smartphone users, uses voice Searching using personal assistant tools such as Siri and Cortana provide instant answers. That does not make any significant number but still for coming time, it is very important to understand how these application provide answers without providing and SERP list.
Local Search making a Move ahead:
Local competition is heating up, there are more smart, nice and honest competitors getting listed and want to get benefit of local SEO to get local customers. In this year, 2017 local seo is almost similar to last year; there is not much change in factors responsible for rankings. You just need to be more creative while building new links and citations. Avoid spamming and paid link tactics for better results. Here are some basic tactics that will help you with your local SEO ranking:
- Claim your local listing on search engines like Google and Bing only if you have not done that before. Also connect your website to business page.
- Focus more on NAP Citations. Be careful use same NAP for citations as you using across whole website.
- Use Schema markup for NAP on website.
- Reach out your customers to get more reviews and comments.
- Featured Snippets
- Optimize website for on-pages with local preferences.
- Optimize for Near Me searches
- Optimize for voice search
Videos Will Still Rule:
Focus On UX:
AS Google itself says; customers are more important that Google algorithm. That means understanding the true intent of your audience is most important. A website that meets all user requirements will always have greater traffic. That is the main reason why all top brands redesign websites regularly.
With the help of analytics you can understand the behavior and needs of user and make certain design changes to meet and complete their requirements. It can have negative impact if you mess with navigations and other important section of your website. So if you want to revamp an unattractive website to get more customers keep certain things in mind:
- Stick to basic formula that is “ Easy to: use, navigate, and understand”
- Understand your customers requirements
- Use relevant information on website.
- Fit for all devices and browsers.
- Always do user testing ( A/B testing) to get unbiased opinions before going live.
- Always make clean urls. And try old url structure if there is no issue with url’s.