How to Improve Your SEO Results: 5 Simple Ways
Gaurav Sharma
Founder & CEO, Attrock | Helping Businesses Grow Their ?? Traffic, Leads, & Sales ?? with Content Marketing, SEO, CRO, ??Branding, Sales Funnel ?? and Email Campaigns | Recognized as Top 100 Content Marketing Influencer
“How to improve SEO” is a top-searched query on Google, with a global search volume of 2.8K.
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that search engine optimization is an obsession with netizens. Everyone from content creators to marketers is looking for clever ways to?reach page 1 of the SERPs?(search engine results pages). The very fact that you’re reading this blog post is evidence in itself.
And, it won’t be wrong to say that when it comes to search engine optimization, Google is a top priority. After all, it claims nearly?70%?of search engine market share. These stats and facts also point in the same direction:
Since the competition to rank on Google Search is so stiff, you must do everything within your power to improve your SEO. Not only will that help you beat the competition, but also?grow your organic traffic?and build your reputation over time.
Sounds good, right?
It is. Thankfully, there are many quick ways to boost SEO and shine in search results. But first, you need to configure your Google Analytics (GA) account correctly.
Why, you ask?
Because it will be the single source of truth when it comes to analyzing your SEO efforts. Though you might be using other?analytics tools?to uncover SEO-related data, you can’t really do away with Google Search Console tools. Their insights and suggestions are based on Google Search algorithms – the ones responsible for your search engine rankings.
By setting up your GA account correctly, you can avoid indexing errors. Google crawlers will read your pages as you intend them to. Moreover, your analytics reports will capture data pertinent to your SEO teams, helping them get quick wins from their efforts.
So, let’s start with configuring your GA account.
Configuring Your Google Analytics (GA)
Assuming that you understand how to set up?Google Search Console, we will move on to how to configure your GA account such that it supports your SEO efforts.
Step 1: Register Your XML Sitemap
Right at the outset, register your XML sitemap with Google Search Console so that it can be read by crawlers. Here’s what a standard XML sitemap looks like:
If you have a WordPress website, you can use their?sitemap plugin?to generate an XML sitemap and sync it with your Google Search Console.
Step 2: Check Your Sitemap for Errors
If you want search engines to index your pages correctly, you need to remove these errors from your sitemap:
Step 3: Ensure Google is Indexing Your Pages
There’s no use of generating a clean sitemap if it isn’t accessible to crawlers. To make sure search engines are fetching your sitemap, perform these steps.
3. To test your website’s indexing page by page, enter each page’s path in the text box displayed. Then, select “Desktop” or “Mobile” in the drop-down below and click on the adjacent “Fetch” button.
4. To submit the above URL for indexing, click on “Request indexing” when the Status is “Complete.”
4. Don’t forget to select the “Crawl this URL and its direct links” option in the “Choose submit method” section below.
5. Last, you need to check if Google is indexing all of your pages. To do this, type “site:” + your domain name in Google Search. Below, you will see the number of pages Google crawlers are indexing.
If this number is less than your actual page volume, it means Google crawlers are unable to find some of your pages. You may have to revisit the meta tags of missing pages.More search results, on the other hand, means you may have a content duplication issue. To identify duplicate content, you can use a tool like Copyscape or Screaming Frog.
With that done, you’ve done your part in ensuring that Google is capturing the right analytics data. Now, you don’t have to worry about skewed reports that don’t reflect SEO issues in real time.
The whole process can be quite exhausting, especially if you have a large organization and have a website that has multiple category pages or an extensive blog. To make the process easier, you can also outsource the work to SEO experts who work?specifically for enterprises.
How to Boost Your SEO Results: 5 Killer Tactics
Now, let’s dive deep into the topic at hand – improving your SEO ranking. Here are five steps you can take to optimize your SEO in all areas – on-page, off-page, and technical:
1. Perform an SEO Audit
The first thing you need to do is?conduct an SEO audit.
But why?
Because an audit will uncover macro and micro issues that are hampering your search ranking, covering everything from content gaps to broken links. By revealing real issues, you remove the guesswork from SEO and get a clear direction for your strategy.
Conducting an SEO audit requires technical knowledge. If you aren’t sure you can take up the challenge, you can also?hire specialists?to do it for you.
If you’d like to do it on your own, we’ve got you covered. Here are the broad steps to be followed in an SEO audit:
Check that All Your URL Versions Are Browseable
Think about all the ways one could type your URL into a browser.
Attrock’s URL can have many versions like:
All the URL versions point to our site. While only ONE of them is the version we registered, the others are 301 redirects to our site’s canonical version. If that doesn’t happen for you, you may be losing out on a lot of organic traffic.
Want a pro tip?
If you have a choice, opt for SSL certification (HTTPS) for your website. It can give your site a slight rank boost and inspire consumer trust.
Check the HTTPS Status of External and JavaScript Links
Start a site crawl in the background to evaluate the status of your external links and enable JS files.
Why, you ask?
While Google Analytics gives consolidated SEO data, a local site crawl can drill down into granular issues like spammy links and robot traffic. For sites built using React or Angular, this step is non-negotiable since GA doesn’t fetch JS data during site audits.
You can use tools like Ahrefs?Site Audit?for this purpose. Just enable the below two options under “Crawl Settings” while kicking off a site crawl.
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Using the tool, you can also confirm the number of internal pages in your website, which helps in cross-referencing search results, as explained in Step 3.
Check Crawl Errors
During a site crawl, you might notice a few crawl errors. For example, the Site Audit tool might show fewer internal pages than shown by Google search results.
If you scroll down, you can see a complete list of crawl errors. This option is available in GA also.
Once you are aware of crawl errors that are preventing search engines from indexing your site, you can resolve them one by one.
Check Whether or Not You Are Ranking for Your Brand Name
It’s possible that your brand name is too generic, fairly new, or not unique. In all cases, you wouldn’t show up as the first organic search result for your brand name in Google.
For example, if your brand name is a broad term like “beanbag,” it may be claimed by other bigger brands.
So, perform a Google search for your brand name to check this issue.
To claim your brand name, you will have to do?link-building activities?like:
Over time, you should see a rank improvement for your brand name.
What if you don’t?
It could be an indication of deeper problems like Google penalties. You might have attracted manual or algorithmic penalties from Google unknowingly. We recommend you check “Manual Actions” in Google Search Console to identify this issue.
In that case, either request a review or rectify the problem by implementing Google’s suggestions.
Check On-Page SEO Elements
We recommend that you start this check from the homepage, and gradually move to other high-traffic pages.
To simplify your on-page audit, try to answer these questions:
One more thing…
While optimizing title tags, don’t forget to check the search volume of your target keywords. Since your aim is to attract organic traffic from search engines, you should target keywords with decent search volume. You can check your search volume and acquisition channel in GA from the main navigation menu.
Doing this extra bit of research will also help you plan your PPC campaigns. High-volume keywords tend to be more competitive and costly for bidders, especially if they have a transactional intent.
You can identify deeper on-page issues in your site crawl report. Try sorting the issues by “Importance.”
It’s advisable to fix Errors first and then move on to Notices and Warnings, in that order.
With that done, you would have sorted the most critical areas of technical and on-page SEO.
2. Conduct a Content Audit
Even if all your on-page elements are optimized, you can’t shine on the SERPs unless your content is top notch. After all, great content is the key to keeping people on page and returning back to your site again and again. As your dwell time and repeat conversions increase, your authority with search engines improves naturally.
Not only that, Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategist,?Ammon Johns, has confirmed that content quality is a key Google ranking factor.
Keeping that in view,?conducting a content audit?is non-negotiable for anybody who wants to improve their SEO results. Among other things, an audit can help identify and fix issues such as:
Duplicate and Thin Content
Duplicate content violates Google’s Panda update and can lead to a rank drop. You can use plagiarism detectors like Copyscape to scour the web and your own website for duplicate content.
Sometimes, multiple pages on your own website have the same content (disclaimers, footers, etc.). Search engines don’t frown on that, but if they find entire posts duplicated on other websites (as with syndicated content), they get confused as to who is the original author.
In that case, use the “rel=canonical” tag in your syndicated content’s HTML schema. You can also request third-party publishers to include a “NoIndex” tag in their content.
Thin content is another red flag for search engines. Anything less than 200 words is considered “thin” by Google’s standards. Such pages should either be discarded or beefed up with high-quality content.
While there’s been a lot of speculation and studies about “ideal content length” from an SEO perspective, we are of the opinion that your content should be long enough to do justice to the topic it’s covering. Even Backlinko came to the same conclusion when they?analyzed?11.8 million webpages. Going by that, it’s obvious that in-depth, long-form blog posts will outperform sparse posts when they are competing for the same keywords.
Outdated Content
For search engines, content freshness is of utmost importance.
The reason?
More often than not, searchers look for fresh information on the web. And since all search engines including Google focus on searcher intent, it’s natural they would rank fresh content higher.
There are many ways by which Google evaluates content freshness, which include:
That said, for some keywords (say, Magna Carta), Google prefers legacy content. But if you operate in fast-moving domains, you will need to update your content on a regular basis.
Reader-Phobic Content
Search engines consider dwell time as a key ranking factor. For that reason, you need to?create content?that is readable and accessible to diverse audiences.
We recommend that you leverage visual content like infographics and videos to engage your visitors. Such easy-to-digest formats allow you to deliver a lot of information without causing user fatigue.
Furthermore, they are avidly shared on social media, which can earn you brownie points from search engines.
What’s more?
Continue reading this blog at?Attrock.com.