Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the most crucial aspects of providing content online. Reaching your target audience and outdoing competitors is almost only possible with SEO practices. Therefore, this SEO brings you 10 steps to rank well on Google.
Setting up SEO tools
SEO tools like Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics, Google Ads, and so on provide relevant insights into your website’s performance. They provide an in-depth understanding of how many people are visiting your website, how much time they spend on it (Bounce Rate), and who these people are. You can access reports for bounce rate, index status, URL and site errors, etc.
Indexing webpages
Google uses crawlers or spiders to scan through all the websites and collect a copy of the information in its database, called an index. The web pages added to the index appear on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Generating and submitting a sitemap (.xml format) helps the search engine decide which page should be crawled and indexed. And adding a robots.txt file to your domain will prevent your pages from being disallowed from being crawled.
Keyword Pointers
Researching Keywords
This SEO agency in Thailand performs keyword research to understand which terms its clients are trying to rank for. Finding out what is working for your competitors, basing your seed keyword on the topic of your blogs, and creating variations of long-tail keywords or phrases related to your blog helps you create content that appears in SERPs. Keyword tools and Google’s ‘Related Searches’ section can help narrow down the list of top keywords relevant to your content, which you can then use to build the content around. Mapping keywords ensures that you target the right pages with the right keywords, which results in optimized traffic on your blog website. Use a keyword search tool like Google Keyword Planner, SEM Rush, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc., to analyze your keywords.
Technical Pointers
Securing Website
Using HTTPS encryption on your website has become important for SEO ranking as it provides encrypted communication with the web servers. SEM Rush’s site audit tool provides a dedicated HTTPS report for your website, or you can also use other tools for the same.
Running Site Audits
Running regular site audits on your website can provide you with the following insights:
- Site Speed: how long it takes for your webpage to download. Ideally, a page that ranks higher downloads within 3 seconds. If your page takes more than 5 seconds, you must fix the download speed.
- Link Audits: checking the performance of backlinks or finding broken internal and outbound links. Running regular audits through GSC or the site audit tool will help you find which backlinks are performing, which ones you should update, which broken link you should fix, and which link you should remove altogether.
Making Mobile-friendly Website
In mid-2019, Google switched to mobile-first indexing, meaning the chances of ranking higher in the SERPs depend greatly on how mobile-friendly your website is. A responsive design not affected by the screen size can increase your website’s visibility. Use GSC’s mobile visibility report to identify which pages are problematic and Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to test where your pages rank in mobile friendliness.
Adding Structured Data
Structured data or Schema markup provides more value to your content by making it easier to understand each section of the content and helping it stand out on the SERPs. Schema.org vocabulary contains formats for organizing data for businesses, people, places, and so on.
On-page and Content Pointers
On-page Strategy
The following factors contribute to on-page pointers:
- Title tags: optimize your title tag (title of the content) by incorporating long-tail keywords. It is the first thing that Google scans after a search query.
- Meta descriptions: this description appears below the links on SERPs. If your meta descriptions are not engaging and informative enough, your organic click-through rate (CTR) will suffer.
- URL: a short and clear URL incorporated with keywords that describe your content will create a higher ranking and CTR.
- Metadata: check the metadata in your page’s source to ensure there are no ‘no-index’ commands. The wrong metatag will prohibit your page from being crawled and indexed.
- Alt text for images: include a short description (alt text) for all the images used in your blog. Alt text allows the bots to crawl and understand your content better, increasing the indexing of your web pages.
Content Strategy
- Satisfy the intent of users. The right keywords are only useful if the content serves users’ queries. Creating content based on users’ intent is important for ranking higher on SERPs.
- Provide authoritative content with correct and trustworthy information.
- Use keywords naturally within the content.
- Make sure the content is free of styling or spelling errors.
- Provide relevant information directly without too much delay.
- Write long-form content to include complete information about that topic and increase your dwell time.
- Duplicate content and topic tags: Remove all duplicate content from your website. Please use only a few topic tags and keywords in the same content so that they start to compete with each other, ultimately hurting your ranking.
Off-page Pointers
Link Building
- Skyscraper Technique: it helps in gathering links to trending and well-performing articles. Add these links to your blog for better outreach.
- Leverage your competition: Conducting a link intersect analysis will show you which links work for your competitors. Add those links to your blog as well.
- Unlinked mentions: A brand monitoring tool can help identify where your blog or brand website was mentioned but not linked. You can ask the owners to convert the mention into links.
Conclusion
Ranking well on SERPs using SEO techniques is a detailed and gradual process. Make sure you follow the checklist provided here for reference, fine-tune it as per your need, and remain patient while waiting to see the results. Apart from this, remember that SEO is an ever-evolving field. Keeping yourself abreast of all the major changes in the algorithms and industry and modifying your strategies is a sure-shot way to achieve success for your blog posts.
