6 SEO Strategies That Google Rewards
Back in the day, copywriters would stuff web content with keywords that were relevant to their industry. For instance, if you’re writing content for a rehab center, you may add keywords such as “Best rehab center near me” or “addiction treatment options”. However, with the addition of Google RankBrain, SEO took a 180-degree turn.
When you enter a search query, the search engine focuses more on the actual meaning and context of the term rather than looking for the exact keywords in the listed web pages. This feature makes it easier for people to find relevant content via the internet. So, it’s important you should create quality content to improve your ranking.
Here are a few other effective SEO strategies that you can give a try:
Quality Scores
It’s no longer sufficient to stuff keywords that are common in your industry. In fact, Google blacklists those websites that use irrelevant keywords or repeat the same keywords again and again to achieve higher rankings.
Just like Google allocates a quality score to advertisements published via Google Ads, it’s likely that the popular search engine treats web pages the same way. SEO enthusiasts identified this concept through research and experiments.
Google looks into the quality of the content, click-through rate, deep click rate, bounce rate, and pogo-sticking rate. Such factors affect the performance of websites and assist search engines in ranking pages on the basis of relevance and quality.
Update Your Website
A web crawler visits web pages every 3 to 4 months to rank them for the relevant keywords. However, if you follow the guidelines and make your site SEO-friendly, then you can achieve higher ranking in days or weeks.
When Google ranks pages, it looks for the exact date and time when it was last updated. If it has been months since you last updated the content on your website, be ready to lose your top ranking to your competitors.
If you want to maintain your competitive edge, it’s crucial to regularly update your website. Publish current and relevant content to attract and retain your target audience as well as improve your search engine rankings.
Create Shareable Content
Today, SEO is all about quality. The higher the quality of the content on your webpage, the higher it’ll rank in search engines.
It’s a lesser known fact that social media greatly influences your search engine rankings. If users share your content on social platforms, then it’ll be easier for you to attain the desired top rankings.
For this purpose, publish content on your website that adds value to your target audience. 80% of marketers include visual content in their marketing strategy since it attracts social media users like nothing else. Visual content isn’t only shared, but your target audience will also be able to recall the content.
Don’t forget to add a share button to your web pages so that the website visitors can share content that they find valuable. It’ll positively affect your reputation and improve search engine rankings.
Make Your Website Responsive
While the content on the webpage is crucial when it comes to search engine rankings, you can’t overlook the importance of website designs. If your website is too complex, you may not be able to achieve higher rankings with the content alone.
Therefore, keep your website user-friendly. If it is easy for visitors to navigate through the pages, your ranking will be higher and better. Focus on enhancing the user experience and Google will reward you with higher search engine rankings.
Mobile internet usage has significantly increased over the years, and 48.2% of internet users access the internet via their smartphones. These statistics suggest why you should make your website responsive. Moreover, search engines also determine whether or not a website is responsive and then ranks it accordingly.
So, if your website isn’t responsive and user-friendly, it’s time you should hire a professional like COHN Media to help to make your website more attractive for your target audience and increase organic traffic through improved search engine rankings.
Website Speed and Performance
If you visit a website and it takes forever to load, would you visit it again? We’re sure you’d look for alternative web pages that offer better performance. 53% of visitors abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Not many people are aware that slow loading web pages lead to a loss of their valuable customer base and negatively affect their search engine rankings. As a result, the number of visitors to your website gradually decreases.
You can try out the following tactics to speed up your website and decrease the page load time:
Minimize the number and size of backend files
Load script files asynchronously
Defer loading of JavaScript files until the remaining content on your website is available
Choose the right hosting options that can accommodate your network traffic
Enable browser caching and inform users that you use cookies on your website
Reduce the quality and size of images
Add a Contact Us Page
Google treats websites that lack sufficient contact information as suspicious. If you want to gain the trust of your audience and also improve your search engine rankings, it’s a must to add a Contact Us page on your website.
The link to your Contact page should be present in the navigation bar. You should also consider adding brief contact information in the footer of every web page.
Investing in search engine optimization is extremely important to gain visibility through improved search engine rankings. At Cohn Media, we offer quality services to our clients and help achieve top search engine rankings.