14 April,2022 09:16 PM IST | Mumbai | BrandMedia
Kunal Shah Director Rank My Business
The Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is a highly competitive arena, with hundreds (and sometimes, thousands) of businesses vying for the same coveted spots on Page 1. No amount of marketing spends could guarantee a business the top organic ranking for a keyword, as SEO is all about strategy and sustained effort. This isn't dissimilar to a closely contested sporting game, in which any team could be the winner depending on their gaming tactics and performance! But unlike other games in which the rules remain the same, SEO is a completely different game - where the top scorers need to stay in step with the changing search engine algorithms, keyword competitiveness, competitor gameplans, changing competition landscape and evolving customer needs. And this requires work.
Having said this, it isn't exactly rocket science to improve and maintain your rankings, and these proactive strategies are proven to help you achieve SERP stardom!
An SEO Audit is designed to take a close look at how your website performs on the various parameters that contribute to organic ranking, such as the on-page and off-page SEO, technical SEO performance, user experience, website structure and more. It makes sense to do this even if you have done so in the past, as the search landscape is rather dynamic and ever-changing, and you do not want to base your future course of action on outdated data.
This is also a good way to set benchmarks and identify gaps and opportunities and uncover market insights, based on the best performing sites. An SEO Audit will be very helpful in planning your strategy and implementation.
Site architecture is essentially the way content is organised and structured on your site. It defines how visitors navigate from one page to another, and also guides search engine crawlers to find and rank content. Having the right website structure is integral to SEO success, as it will help both users and search engines access and identify the most important pages on your site. Not only this, it will allow search engines to understand what your site is about, and index pages accordingly.
It is important to keep reviewing (and revisiting) your website structure from time to time. As new content and pages are added, your site architecture needs to accommodate these and evolve in a way that simplifies and enhances user experience. Moving important pages higher up in navigation and internal linking of new pages with high-ranking pages are good tactics to help users and search engines discover new pages, and contribute in building topical authority. After all, there is no point in adding new content if it cannot be easily navigated to!
It is not for nothing that content is now touted as king in the marketing world. Nowhere is this more obvious than in SEO. The changing Google algorithms make this even more evident by rewarding pages with high quality content. The last decade has seen search engines gunning to create an intuitive and credible experience for their users, and with every algorithm update, this goal is even further refined. This makes it non-negotiable to invest in great content for your webpages - that which is relevant, engaging and offers value to the reader.
You could look at the current high-ranking pages for your target keywords and draw learnings from those. Don't be afraid to explore new ideas when it comes to content - originality and relevance is usually rewarded, along with long format content into topics of your expertise. Apart from regularly updating high performing content, it is good to add fresh content as well - to let search engines know that there is new activity on your site. You could also look to optimize your content for featured snippets - which spotlight the most relevant results at the top of the page. While there is no guaranteed way to achieve this, you could observe the structure and styles of existing featured snippets to further improve your own content.
This is with respect to both internal linking and back linking - which play a primary role in helping search engines make sense of the interrelation between pages on a site, and pages on the same topic across multiple sites.
As old fashioned as this might seem, backlinks continue to remain an integral parameter when it comes to page rank. Earning back links from other trustworthy sites will improve your website's Domain Authority (DA). It has been observed that a higher DA score usually correlates with a higher SERP ranking, which further boosts the credibility (and traffic) of the page in question. It is a good idea to proactively explore backlink opportunities such as directory listing and guest blogging, among others.
While there is no surefire way to earn backlinks, one must not ignore internal link building. This is one of the easiest strategies that you could implement to boost your ranking. This needs to be done strategically, by linking related pages together. One example is to link new pages with well performing existing content on your own site so as to build topical authority and increasing the odds of ranking for that topic. We can guarantee that this will be well received by both users and search engines!
SEO is not a one-time exercise. Continuous and sustained efforts are required for best results; this reflects that you care enough to keep your website updated with the changing times and evolving users. Many business owners make the mistake of doing a one-time SEO activity at the time of launching their website, or publishing new content. But this will not help in the long run, as the competition activity or search intent would definitely change, rendering the earlier SEO work ineffective.
Optimizing includes keeping a close tab on the performance of each page and CTRs for different keywords, and making the necessary changes to maintain and improve ranking. This usually entails repairing broken links, adding new internal and back links, improving the speed and making the website mobile friendly, among other things. But apart from these technical aspects, it also entails updating existing content and adding fresh content around your area of expertise on a regular basis.
As with any organization, being proactive is always a good approach to growth and success. Instead of waiting to overhaul your website and content when new algorithms are introduced, regularly working on your SEO will keep your website in good stead over the longer run.
We at Rank My Business excel at helping our clients stay on the growth curve with strategic and sustained SEO efforts, among other digital marketing tactics. While the guidelines above are general and usually work for all, we have learnt that every website requires a tailored approach which is best decoded through regular efforts.
Article by: Mr.Kunal Shah, Director, Rank My Business
