10 SEO Tips To Boost Your Search Rankings Today

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If you’re not on the first page of Google, you have little hope of getting any traffic from search. 91.5% of Google traffic goes to page one. Another 4.8% goes to page two. Beyond that, you’re in no-man’s-land.

With search engines, no-man’s-land is a constantly shifting landscape depending on who is searching. Google began using personalized search years ago, factoring in things like past search history, demographics, location, and device usage to determine how one searcher’s results will differ from another. That means there are potentially countless page ones for a search term.

This makes it easier for searchers to find the information they are looking for. It also gives marketers a better shot at attracting customers with inbound marketing. Still, the number one marketing challenge that companies face is not enough search traffic. Research done by Hubspot found that 65% of businesses feel that their biggest issue when it comes to marketing is that they need to generate more traffic and leads.

Are you getting the traffic you’d like from your SEO efforts? Could your business use a brand awareness or lead generation boost from a sustainable increase in organic search traffic?

SEO is a long term play. And while investing time and effort into SEO consistently over time is what will ultimately improve your search rankings, there are some quick fixes you can implement today to improve your search rankings right away.

Create content that appeals to humans. This is your number one goal for SEO – not to prioritize it. The reason is this: sure, SEO best practices will encourage the search engine crawlers, such as the Google bots, to index your site well. But, it’s humans, the web searchers who are going to comment on your posts, link back to your informative infographic, and share your value-driven content on social media, who will gift your website with a competitive edge. They care about your content, not your keyword usage and alt tags. So don’t forget to provide value with your content.

Today’s search engines are sophisticated and smart enough to tell whether your content is aimed at manipulating the rankings or not. But at the same time, they can also identify content that people will find valuable. So when writing your content, think about what will truly bring value to your readers (the humans!), then look at how you can optimize it for the robots.

Google loves websites that update their content regularly. So if you have a blog, you want to make sure you are publishing new content on a consistent basis which will gradually improve SEO of your website.

For most companies, they see the highest ROI for lead conversions when they are posting a new blog every day. But if you don’t have the resources to do so, you can start with once per week. You do want to aim for at least one blog a week though, since if you do less than that your readers may forget about your blog.

According to Sean Si, Founder of SEO Hacker, when it comes to indexing the pages on your site you only have a limited ‘crawl budget.’ The Google bots can’t spend all day, every day crawling every page on your site.

You probably have some pages you definitely want on SERPs, like the compelling content you’ve worked so hard on to help generate leads. Your About Me and Checkout pages, on the other hand, don’t need to be seen in search engine results pages. They aren’t likely to bring in organic traffic anyway.

The solution – go into your robots.txt file and put a noindex/nofollow tab on those pages you don’t need to appear.

How strong are your keywords? Are you targeting the right ones? Josh Bachynski of SEO Hangouts suggests identifying the keywords you want to rank for based on what you’re selling, plugging them into search engines, and then looking at what the competition is on the SERP. Then, using Google Ads Keyword Planner, look for the broad match keyword variations. Use one main keyphrase per page.

As a newer site or if you don’t already have a strong page rank, use long tail keywords and choose the ‘low hanging fruit’ – the lower volume keywords that are going to be easier to rank for.

Also look out for ‘search homonyms,’ which are vague terms that could refer to various different and unrelated things. A great example of confusing homonyms is the word “apple.” When you search “apple,” are you looking for the Apple brand or apple fruit? When selecting the keywords you will be using, try to get as specific as you can and avoid confusing homonyms that might negatively affect your search rankings (even if it’s less likely, after Google’s RankBrain and BERT updates).

Title tags of your web pages and blog posts are one of the most important factors influencing your SEO and Google ranking. The title tag is what is displayed in search results.

So in your title tags, you will want to include long tail keywords, which are those keyword phrases that are relevant and specific to the topic of your content. You will also want to keep your title tags to 50-60 characters as that is the optimal character length.

While you want to make your title tags easy for Google to find and rank your content, they should also be easy for people to understand. After all, real humans (not robots) will be the ones searching for those keywords and reading your content.

Some SEO experts also suggest placing your keywords toward the front of your title tags, but others believe this isn’t necessary. Whether this does make a difference on your search ranking or not, it doesn’t hurt to apply this rule to your title tags.

Meta description is the line of text that appears below your titles or headings in search results. While meta descriptions do not have a direct impact on search rankings, they are extremely important in helping searchers see if they have found what they are looking for and in getting them to click through to your content. So make them compelling (and include variations of your keywords anyway).

The length of meta descriptions that Google displays keeps varying, but keep them in the range of 120 to 150 characters.

Headings are extremely important as they help Google understand what to expect in the following sections of your content. Make sure your H2 and H3 headings are optimized for SEO. By including keywords in these tags, you help Google see that the content under a heading will be covering the same topic as your keywords.

Google also looks at your URLs when it comes to search rankings, so you want to make sure your URLs include keywords that are relevant to your business which your audience will likely be searching for.

Leave out low-value words like “and,” “or,” etc. that add clutter and make your URLs more spammy looking. Omitting low-value words ultimately helps Google to better understand what your content is about, making your content appear to be of higher quality, which helps with your SEO. Edit your permalinks to only include relevant terms and to weed out ‘stop words,’ which slow down your indexing. Here is a list of stop words.

Optimizing your URLs may also involve improving your site structure. You will want to follow the proper hierarchy to build a powerful site structure that boosts your search rankings.

Adding alt text to your images not only improves the accessibility of your content for those with vision impairments, but it also tells Google what the images are. Since Google can’t “see” images and can only read text, adding keyword-rich alt text helps Google “read” your images, which in turn helps improve your SEO.

Keyword-rich alt text is about being descriptive and short but not spammy. Your alt text should contain your target keywords and phrases relevant to your content as well as the context and purpose of your image.

Linking your content to other sites that have domain authority shows Google that you are providing good, valuable information to readers, which enhances your credibility and improves your ranking.

While you may be tempted to add as many links as you can, you don’t want to include irrelevant or low-quality ones that make your content look like it is trying to manipulate the search engine rankings. This can make your content seem spammy, which diminishes its value and credibility. Always include high-quality links that are relevant to the topic of your content, which your readers will find useful.

While Google may not be using social sharing in their search algorithms, it doesn’t mean you can’t use social shares to boost your SEO. Since Google tracks (aka. crawls) Facebook and Twitter, it will see any content that is shared.

Social sharing also drives your brand awareness. The greater visibility and awareness your brand gets, the more potential customers and prospects will be searching your company. This signals Google to give greater weight to your content, which benefits your search rankings.

To make it easier for people to share your content, consider adding social sharing buttons to your blogs. You can also ask your audience directly to share your content. Just make sure you don’t do this for every single post you publish since it can feel spammy and overly self-promotional.

Visual content drives social media engagement and sharing, so you should add compelling visuals to your content. Take Twitter for example, tweets with images get 89% more likes and 150% more retweets!

You will also want to cross-promote your content on multiple social channels to increase your reach and sharing. Make sure to tailor your messaging for each channel as every platform serves a unique audience, and what they find appealing may differ from the audience of another channel.

Another essential for optimizing your site for search engines is going in and routinely checking user experience. A fast-loading, clearly laid-out, well-maintained site is going to keep visitors on your site and make it more appealing for both searchers and search engines.

Once you’ve implemented all of these tips, you’re still not done. There’s always more to learn and ways to improve. And – Google’s always making changes that impact which SEO techniques we should use and how we use them.

Make a commitment to keep learning and keep measuring. Pay attention to how your metrics change as you make improvements to your site and stay on top of what’s going on with SEO. Just like anything in life, the more you invest, the more you get back. The better web traffic is definitely worth the SEO efforts.