5 SEO Strategies for Search Engine Positioning Improvement

Finding your next restaurant experience, the perfect pair of shoes and a new dinner recipe have never been easier thanks to search engines. We type what we need and within seconds have endless options to explore all coming from various corners of the internet.

But with such a competitive landscape, how can brands break through the noise?

Search engine optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO, is a key component for brands who are wanting to reach audiences and rank on search engines, like Bing and Google.

So, what is SEO?

SEO is the process of driving traffic and gaining visibility through search results. It can help boost traffic to your site, bring in leads, reach new audiences and boost business revenue. Though there are paid opportunities to help with your audience reach and brand visibility, SEO typically resides within the organic search results. The most common types of SEO include On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. These three SEO components contribute to your overall presence in search results.

Whether you put a strategy in place last year or are just starting to mold one out, visiting and revisiting your SEO efforts is an ongoing tactic.

Where do you begin? Here are 5 ways you can improve your SEO strategy:

Update Existing Content

Starting with what you already have is one of the easiest ways to improve your SEO.

Marketing is an ever-changing landscape. New data comes in daily, best practices are constantly reworked, and trends and insights shift week by week. Aside from an SEO best practice, reviewing and updating your content on a frequent basis is key to keeping relevant content on your site.

When doing so, keep the following in mind:

• Determine how frequently you wish to review and update content. (Ex: 6 months, 12 months, 24 months, etc.)
• Work on high-potential pages first –pages that have some traction and have potential to do better with some refresh support. Visit your Google Analytics page to help aid you.
• Explore how you want to update your content. This can look like optimizing for search intent, reformatting content, adding more visuals, adding internaland external links, and removing unnecessary information.

This refresh will ensure your content stays competitive and informative, and help your site see a new wave of traffic.

Tip: Don’t forget the power of images. Including visuals benefits your SEO strategy in a number of ways, when optimized correctly. Writing effective alt tags, using image formats for fast page loading, and having original images are just some ways to do so.

Include Subheaders

Ranking within Google’s featured snippets –those large boxes that pop up at the top of search results –can be obtained through the usage of subheaders in your content. How does that work? Google pulls your content’s subheaders into a list-based featured snippet and distributes that out based on SEO.

Improve your chances of being featured and add or include descriptive subheaders within your content.

Tip: Be consistent and use the same H tag.

Target Low Competitive Keywords

There is a lot of content out there with many brands aiming for the same goals and targeting the same keywords. While funneling content toward those competitive keywords is one way to tap into the noise, another is channeling your focus into low completive and question keywords.

Question keywords are questions searchers are asking around your topic and low competitive keywords are keywords that don’t get many searches, but tap into bigger keyword searches.

Tip: Repurpose content you already have to engage with these low competitive and question keywords, but be sure to craft new content that specifically taps into them.

Include Internal + External Links

Your content should easily stand on it owns, but utilizing inbound and external links –also known as backlinks – can give your content the seal of approval for search engine ranking. Search engines favor content with linking as it cements a sense of trust and credibility. However, not all links are created equal. Search engines will analyze the type of links coming in and out of content to determine the quality and quantity connected to your page, and if it ranks.

How can you build your inbound and external links? A few ways to do that is by:

• Be a guest contributor on other sites.
• Build content around trending stories or topics.
• Create shareable content.
• Share out data-driven content.

Tip: One way to build quality backlinks is to connect with suppliers and partners to link back to relative content.

Design For Mobile

A recent study by Exploding Topics showed that over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices and more than 90% of internet users access the internet from their mobile device. Knowing this, it’s important to ensure your web page is mobile-friendly as search engines do use this in their ranking factors. You can test your web sites mobile friendlessness through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

When assessing your mobile-friendless, consider the following:

• Loading speed. How fast is your website loading on mobile devices? Search engines take this into ranking consideration so make sure your page is loading quickly.
• Responsive layout. Ensuring your website rescales itself to each mobile device being used now only makes the user experience go smoothly, but it will also help boost your SEO value and helps Google’s algorithm.
• Limiting pop ups. Pop ups do not display as well on mobile as they do on desktop. You can still include pop ups to your mobile experience, but adjusting it for mobile is important.
• Adding a Viewport Meta tag. Adding a Meta tag to your page allows developers to control the scaling of the page. Why is this important? By doing so, each device that opens up your web page will automatically have their browse resize the webpage specifically to their device screen.

Tip: Designing for your mobile experience is key, but monitoring its performance is something that needs to be consistently worked on and added to your monthly reporting.