Boosting your online exposure and generating quality traffic is the foundation of your online success. To rank high in the highly competitive SERPs is challenging and requires a lot of effort, passion, and dedication. However, getting to the #1 spot on Google is only half the battle. The other half is, of course, maintaining your stellar rankings.
Here are a few steps you should take to stay competitive.
Keep publishing great content regularly.
How many times have you heard that content is king? Well, that’s true. Creating highly engaging, content helps you boost your online visibility. Most importantly, it gives you the opportunity to prove that you know what you’re talking about and become a highly valued online resource. Once people start seeing the value you bring to them through your posts, they will start sharing them and linking to them regularly. In other words, content marketing is a long-term investment in your brand image and competitiveness.
Make sure your blog posts are highly authoritative, data-backed, and interactive. To get the most of them, experiment with different forms of content. Using the same types of content on our blog may affect your customers’ reading experience. To keep them interested, you need to spice things up a bit. For example, lists, infographics, podcasts, videos, case studies, and original research have proven to be powerful engagement boosters.
Improve your link building tactics.
Link building still plays an immensely important role in your SEO strategy, but only when planned and executed strategically. One of the major mistakes digital marketers make is focusing on the quantity rather than the quality of their backlinks. Google is getting smarter constantly and its main goal is to provide its users with relevant, accurate, and data-oriented information.
For example, if its bots notice that most of your backlinks point to the same article or that your backlink portfolio is growing unreasonably fast, Google won’t rank you high and it may even decide to penalize you.
This is something you want to avoid. There are numerous amazing link building practices that may boost your online rankings and visibility, including commenting on authoritative sites in your niche, writing testimonials, link reclamation, and broken link building. Still, you should pay special attention to your guest blogging efforts.
Make sure you publish content on highly reputable sites. In their recent guide on building quality links, Four Dots, a New York SEO company, has listed a few elements you need to consider when assessing link building ops manually:
The information you can find in the SERPs, like their domain name, meta tags, and the presence/absence of rich snippets
Homepage elements, such as external links, spammy anchors, the visual appeal and responsiveness, contact information, social media profiles, the blog archive, and the number of ads.
Content-related metrics, such as the relevancy of content to your niche, the quality of their posts, and the number of sponsored posts.
Above all, remember that you’re writing articles for people and not search engine bots. Your guest posts need to be informative and deliver value to the people reading them.
Prioritize your visitors’ satisfaction.
Marketers overcomplicate their business goals, forgetting what really matters and that’s keeping customers happy. That’s the basis of generating leads, turning them into paying customers and retaining them. Here are a few user experience factors you need to consider to boost your SEO efforts.
Speed your site up.
If your page doesn’t load in less than 3 seconds, most of your visitors will leave it frustrated and never come back. In the era of voice search and UX web design, people’s demands have also grown. This is why Google has made page speed one of the most significant ranking factors, especially with the latest Speed Update.
Here are just a few ways to give your page speed a boost:
Invest in a content delivery network.
Cut HTTP requests.
Allow compression.
Leverage browser caching.
Minimize server response time.
Use a fast web host.
Optimize images by reducing their size.
Invest in responsive web design.
As the number of mobile searchers is rising at an astounding pace, Google has recently launched its mobile-first index. From now on, it will assess the mobile version of your site. Unsurprisingly, to maintain your rankings, you need to make sure your site is responsive. For starters, simplify your navigation menu, make your content readable, boost its speed, make sure your CTAs are easily tappable and prominent, and use HTML5 to support your video content.
Optimize meta tags
If your potential visitors don’t see what your page is about, they will skip it. Unsurprisingly, poor user experience may hurt your SEO efforts. So, how to optimize your meta tags to prevent your high rankings from slipping away?
For starters, you need to target your most popular keywords and find the pages related to those phrases. The next step is to optimize the meta tags for these pages. First, make sure they’re concise. While the title should contain about 65 characters, meta description needs to have up to 160 characters. Second, optimize your title tags for the right keywords, but don’t spam them. Finally, make your meta tags informative so both users and search engines can know what your page is about before visiting it.
Build a solid social media presence.
Social networks give you the opportunity to humanize your brand, provide real-time customer support, and connect with your target audience on an emotional level. Your social media presence also allows you to promote your content effectively and drive loads of organic traffic to your site.
To boost customer engagement, you should add social media share buttons to your articles and implement catchy CTAs to your content. Also, make your content promotion strategy consistent. Social media management platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer can help you schedule your posts and save up a lot of time. Sure, don’t forget the importance of sharing behind-the-scenes photos, responding to your customers’ questions regularly, organizing giveaways, and publishing attention-grabbing content like videos or memes.
Closing thoughts
Once you earn yourself high rankings, you need to fight for them. Focus on bringing value to a customer. Keep creating quality content, invest in spam-free link building methods, tailor your website design to its visitors’ needs, and humanize your brand on social networks. Most importantly, don’t forget that SEO is a long-term investment that doesn’t deliver results overnight. So, be patient and make your decisions strategically.
Hope this helps!