We’ve all been there. You’ve spent a couple days creating amazing content for your customer base that once they find it online, will blow them away and have them crawling at your doorstep ready to hand over their money.
A week goes by and nothing. Then two and three weeks go by. Reality sets in. There appears to be a problem. The search engine gods have buried your content to your demise.
Your new content doesn’t rank, at all
Fortunately, if you follow a few simple strategies in this article, the search engine gods will start to favor your new content.
Ranking new content starts with Google indexing. Google will crawl through websites, discover pages, and then apply an algorithm to determine your overall rank on a search engine result page (SERP). Once your website has been crawled and indexed, you’re on the map and can focus on ranking accordingly.
Unfortunately, unless you’re Kim Kardashian, you’re new content isn’t going to be immediately indexed after being published. Luckily, you can change this.
Using a number of best practices, you’ll be able to rank new content and fast. In turn, growing in the rankings will help you increase your conversion rate, gain more brand exposure, and improve your profits.
High quality content that people are searching for
The first step in ranking new content is making sure that it is not only high quality, but the content is targeting what your customers are searching for. Targeting featured snippets is a great place to start.
For those needing a refresher lesson on what’s a featured snippet? Let’s say you’re looking for “what are the best blinds to keep heat out?”. After typing that in, Google is going to show you an answer box that says, “Venetian Blinds. These wood blinds are very good insulators but can warp in extreme heat. They are excellent in the heat and light control simply because the slats could be tilted – By Rapid Blinds & Shutters.”
Once you’ve determined content ideas around featured snippets that your customers are searching for, it’s time to start creating. The blog should be long enough so that your keywords flow naturally with content that is valuable, reliable and accurate. Aim for about 1,100 – 2,000 word blogs that includes keywords relevant to the snippet your targeting. Be sure to add different variations and cover all keyword possibilities that are relevant.
When done correctly, your rankings will improve slightly just by utilizing multiple keyword variations. Over time, this ranking will continue to improve as long as the keywords stay relevant and the content is in demand (being searched for).
Once you’ve developed high quality content, focus on the following SEO tactics.
URL optimization and speed
There are two things that you want to do with your URL. First and foremost, you want to use Google’s URL Inspection Feature. It’s fast, free and imperative to optimizing your URL. To do this, you’ll need to login to your Google Search Console and follow the on-screen instructions. This will index your URL so it’s more accessible to search engines.
The second step is optimizing URLs for the content you’ve created. Create URLs that include the snippet topic. Here are two examples:
Correct: https://www.yoursite.com/best-blinds-to-keep-heat-out
Incorrect: https://www.yoursite.com/9-10-19/post45
With URL optimization, comes page speed optimization. With patience being at an all-time low, website speed is extremely important and could be the final decider on whether or not a user stays to read the new content you spent hours on.
One or two seconds longer in load time could have someone bouncing back to the search engines, which is not good.
Sitemap
Having an XML sitemap is an important technical aspect of SEO and is pretty easy to implement. A sitemap lists your website’s entire library of individual page URLs/content and creates a map of how everything is connected and structured. It makes it way easier for your website to be indexed and acts as a form of communication between your site and search engines.
Make sure that your sitemap is accurate and up to date. This will help your site get indexed faster and in turn, ranked sooner.
Another important SEO tactic is utilizing and optimizing title and meta description tags. A title tag is what appears as the hyperlink on search engines for visitors to click on.
A meta description tag is the little preview of information that appears on a search engine underneath the title tag. It is used to help describe the content of your page to both search engines and visitors. When you have a strong meta description tag, search engines are better able to match your content with what people are looking for.
To get the most out of these features, make sure that you create compelling content that acts to persuade people to visit your site. With an increased click through rate, you will experience an increase in your overall ranking. Use subtle keywords and make sure you adhere to the character limit for both.
Internal links
We’re all familiar with the importance of backlinks, but internal links are another crucial aspect to focus on. What’s better is that unlike backlinks, you’re in control of developing internal links and you don’t have to rely on others.
To get the most out of this step, go through your website and add internal links to connect all of your content. If you haven’t been doing this from the beginning, it will take some time to get everything up to speed. Once you’re caught up, it’s easy to internally link articles or blogs in the future. When you add internal links to your content, they’re easier to index and satisfy search engine’s algorithms for ranking. Just make sure that you’re linking together pages that are relevant and avoid adding links just for the sake of it.
Finally, what’s the point of creating new content if you can’t share it on social media? Viral content is huge these days and if you want to be a part of the action, you need to increase your social shares. To get the best results, promote your blog or article on all platforms such as: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit.
Doing this doesn’t always directly impact your ratings but it will increase brand awareness, build credibility, help you gain more backlinks, and increase the likelihood of new conversions.
If you post new content, share it on social media. If you go viral, you’ll experience increased rankings immediately. However, with time, your rankings will level out. That doesn’t mean this step is wasted, it just means that people will eventually move on to the next best thing and you won’t be able to continually benefit off of one piece of content. They will, however, now know exactly who you are and what your company does.
Bottom line
To get the most out of your website, it’s important to take the time to create new content that people are searching for and optimize it for search engines. The above tips, in addition to other SEO tips and best practices, are a great way to ensure that your online presence stays relevant. Your website is a well-oiled machine and when you leverage all of the above tips together instead of picking and choosing a few tactics, you’ll see the best results.