Learn what techniques actually work for SEO.
Master the techniques that actually get you a number 1 ranking in the search results
Make your site rank at the top of the google search results for your keyword and market.
We will show you the top 7 strategies to get higher rankings on search engines (plus one bonus strategy)
Introduction
This ultimate SEO guide will show you what techniques work for SEO and how you can master some of the techniques required to get sites ranking today. Whether you are an SEO consultant, SEO company or offer SEO services this guide will show you how to up your SEO game. We look at all of the ranking factors and search engine optimization techniques and show you which ones we highly recommend for search marketing.
- Rank Brain – the era of AI in search is upon us
- Keyword Research
- Content
- Links (internal and external)
- Speed
- Technical
- Mobile
- Get the basics right!
Rank Brain – the era of AI in search is upon us
Understand RankBrain like an AI Jedi!
Rank brain is one of the most important Google updates in recent times. It can fundamentally change the game for SEOs and organic search.
Key Points
- Rank Brian is the most significant thing in SEO
- It is the era of Artificial intelligence in search
Rank Brain is an artificial intelligence tool that looks at a search query and the associated user behavior with a particular website and modifies the search result based on the user experience. Therefore, with appropriate metrics, it is possible for a site with very few links and no particular close keyword matching to rank very well for a keyword if a lot of people tend to like that site over others for the same topic. This is huge for SEO! It cannot be overstated that this is a significant development in the search industry.
Keyword Research
Learn how to find keywords that people are searching for that you can rank for
Get targeted users to your site that will convert
There are some simple FREE tools and techniques for doing keyword research like a pro
Key Points
- Conduct Thorough Keyword Research from multiple sources
- Don’t over-optimize for one particular keyword
- The keyword is still crucial, but it’s more about relevance now
You must conduct thorough keyword research using multiple tools and techniques. We recommend Semrush, they have a great suite of tools. The trick is finding keywords with lots of traffic, that is relevant, without relatively little competition that will convert.
Targeting – if people aren’t searching for it – it’s no good ranking #1
This one sounds so simple but I have seen this basic keyword research issue missed on multiple occasions. It is so often presumed that the keyword is known but if people aren’t searching for it then it doesn’t matter if you have the number one rank for it – you will still get no traffic and no sales!
The example that springs to mind were an equipment manufacturer that was hell-bent on trying to rank for their very specific machine number – e.g XAF-5032-AB – “of course, right?”, well while they made really nice equipment nobody knew what the heck an XAF-5032-AB was, so guess what – nobody search for it. What they really wanted to rank for was “XAF widget making machine” which people did search for”.
After showing the client this and then ranking for the actual keyword they were amazed at the power of SEO and the penny dropped on how appropriate keyword research can make or break an online marketing strategy
Disclaimer: This was a real example but the keywords have been changed to ensure client confidentiality.
Another useful tool is alsoasked.com – this tool gives you a great visualization of the questions that people ask. Using this for keyword and topic research can be very helpful in fully answering a topic and understanding what your target audience is interested in.
NLP – Natural Language Processing
Modern search engines are capable of understanding what a page is about, rather than just matching keywords.
A major change in the way search engines views content is passage indexing. With passage indexing, it is possible to rank for a plethora of terms. A page is considered in sections and it allows you to jump to the result you are interested in the page, rather than just have a page that is related to your topic of interest generally returned to you.
Here is the Google SERP for the “11-20 principle” where we have the featured snippet shown below.
The link that you click on looks like this – sometimes referred to as a hashbang URL with the # symbol and the additional info on the URL.
This takes you to the exact relevant section on the page and highlights the result.
That means focussing on your topic is key to ranking for a whole plethora of keyword searches. This issue was brought to the fore with Google’s hummingbird update which sought to understand the semantic relationship between content and searcher intent. There were many elements to this prior to 2013 but this was the era that it became a well-known entity. This is continuing today and is finding its way into the Knowledge Graph, voice search, and searcher intent.
Check out this Moz article on the hummingbird update and also Search Engine Journal’s article on Google Algorithm Update History
Relevance & Contextually Related
Being contextually related to your topic and other pages on your site around the same topic are also very important.
Long tail
The long tail of keywords is kind of dying in terms of a broad strategy but it is still relevant today. I refer to this more now as “keyword sprinkling” which just means making sure you are using all relevant and related keywords within your content by stuffing them in everywhere. Note that keyword sprinkling has nothing to do with keyword density.
Swmrush detail the importance of Long Tail Keywords
Moz did a nice Whiteboard Friday on the topic of Long Tail Keywords
Keyword density
Keyword density was once the topic of feverous debate. Surely there was an optimum keyword density that Google would love! Well, it has long since been recognized that you should not focus on keyword density, other than just to make sure you are not stuffing your site with the same repetitive keywords over and over again.
The generally recognized industry practice is to mention your keywords 3 to 5 times within your main body content somewhere near the beginning of your content.
Amazon
Continuing on our Credit Card theme – Amazon search suggest is a great tool for finding keyword ideas. You can start out with Amazon just by using their search suggestions, however, you can also navigate to specific categories and look at the subcategories within your topic or target keyword to get further ideas about popular topics.
Pro Tip: Find a best-selling book on Amazon in your niche and look at all of the other related books and editorial reviews for great keyword ideas.
Google search suggest
Google’s search suggest is a great keyword research tool in its own right. One of the more interesting stats of search is that there are many keywords (roughly 20%) every month that have never been searched for before. Google search suggest is usually giving you a useful indication as to the additional “Keyword Sprinkling” you can do to help build out your content and topical relevancy
Another great Google feature is “People also ask” with question type searches being particularly specific and useful in some niches. This can really help to give you an insight into what you should be targeting and what content you have on your site.
Pro Tip: Build content around answering real problems that people have
Reddit can be a gold mine of content and keyword ideas and it is what real interested users are talking about and the content they are generating. This can’t be underestimated. Looking here for ideas on keywords and content is a very worthwhile endeavor.
Product Reviews
Product reviews are a great (as long as you have a good product with good reviews – if not seek reputation management) source of user-generated content. Using markup data such as Schema.org for aggregate rating helps search engines understand more about your data. Structured data and microformats will continue to be an important part of how search engines view your site and display it in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) which can help to give your site an edge.
The SERPs can show user reviews (shown below are paid not organic results) which can be a very valuable source of a) 3rd party recommendations and b) content and keyword ideas
The reviews in the snippet above show the following potential keyword ad content ideas;
- Cashback
- Daily expenses
- $500
- Pay off each month
- Full balance
- Cashback
User-generated content is a gold mine
As you can see the content that your target audience generate is literally the stuff that you should be targeting. They are basically doing your keyword research for you, but it’s even better than that because you get great insight into what matters to them and what they are talking about.
Content
Learn how to create killer content that search engines love to rank
Your content does the hard work for you, earning links and generating high rankings for your site.
Multiple studies have shown that long-form content with 1800 words or more wins over short web pages.
Backlinko Search Engine Ranking Study
Key points
- Content is still king – more true than ever
- Long-form content wins hands down
- You just need a few high-quality content pages
- Use keyword sprinkling for semantic search
It has been said that content is king and that is true to many extents. Without any content, you would not have much of a website and without great content, you would not have anything worthy of linking to or ranking. So content is still king and this is more true now than ever.
The good news is that you don’t need hundreds and thousands of pages each targeted to a very specific keyword. What you do need is high-quality content that goes above and beyond the typical pages in the SERPs. Pages that answer a question or offer specific information that fits with the searcher’s intent are what will see your content ranking above your competition.
Content with images makes a significant difference too. This is because people skim websites, they don’t sit down and read detailed long pages of text, they want visuals and interactions. From the same study of 1 million websites by Backlinko, they found a strong relationship between image used in the content and the rankings on the first page.
In creating high-quality content you will be doing keyword sprinkling, where you take all of your keywords and related topical information and make sure that your content is referencing and including those keywords. Naturally, you will want to make sure you mentioned your target keywords at least 3 times and probably not more than 5 times. This is nothing to do with keyword density – that metric died a death a long time ago, it is just to make sure that you are focussing on what your page is about.
Links (internal and external)
Get quality relevant backlinks that will boost your search rankings.
Links are still the cornerstone of search – it’s possible to rank without a lot of links but having high-quality backlinks from related resources helps A LOT.
Page rank is Google’s defining metric, it assigns value to a seed set of high-quality sites and measures the flow of the links propagating across the web. A link is seen as a vote and these votes matter a lot.
For more information on page rank, read Wikipedia’s article on page rank
Internal linking is one of the most underused aspects of SEO. It’s also one which we have direct control over making for some seriously low-hanging fruit if used correctly.
Coupling in PR and internal linking to do “link sculpting” allows SEOs to dictate which pages are pushed up in the SERPs
Speed
Make lightning-fast load times by figuring out what slows your site down
A fast loading website is better for users and that means search engines will rank your site higher
Faster is usually better and it’s no different in search, most of your site visitors will be clicking the back button if your page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. You can lose up to 90% of your traffic through a slow-loading page.
Above is an example of how you can use Chrome’s inspection tool to look at how the content is being loaded and fine areas that can be improved.
Key Points
- Google says it matters!
- Load time, efficiency, and user experience all play into Rank Brain
- Artificial intelligence
Moz did a great job of listing some of the things that affect page load time and how that affects SEO. Google had indicated that page load time is one of the ranking signals that they use to make sure they are giving their users the best experience.
Technical SEO
Fix those little technical SEO bugs that are holding your site back
Optimizing all of the important technical details means the search engines will love your content and want to crawl through your site.
Mobile First Index
Understand the mobile-first index and what it means for your site
Optimizing your web pages, blog posts, and social media platforms with the mobile user in mind will help you give your users what they want – and this is what search engines want too, so do this and they will reward you!
Key points
- The Mobile-first index is here and you need to pay attention to it
You can’t just design your website for one particular use and sit back and wait. You need to make sure you have a responsive well performings site that works in all devices well and displays your content properly. It’s not good to have a page with a buy now button hidden out of view on a mobile device – that won’t work well for you!
FACT: People use mobile devices differently – they expect different things and they spend less time browsing.
Take for example the graph below – mobile organic searches are the biggest volume but the worst performing in terms of pages per session. There is much more to be looked at here than just this plain stat but it is an indicator that mobile performance should be improved.
Get the basics right!
It’s all well and good to spend time following the latest trend and technique, but if you don’t have the basics right and good fundamentals to build on you are fighting a loosing battle.
