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I got into SEO and website development by circumstance and my fastidious character. I was starting a new company to which I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into search engine optimization. This was about two years ago and prior I had made a bunch of websites for my other B2B ventures to which I never incorporated SEO as a marketing strategy. Thinking back that was a big mistake but at the time I had a lot on my plate as I was trying to figure out how to use all these different website builders for small business while working on my craft of designing and developing websites for these companies I was working on.

I ended up window shopping a number of different vendors, companies and freelancers that did search engine optimization and I never really came across any solution that I thought was worth its money for the kind of work that was performed.

Instead I learned the ins and outs myself, gluing my sockets to my computer screen, scouring google and youtube for answers. I don’t really recommend this as there is way too much to know and it ends up becoming overwhelming especially if you have other things on your plate.

I got back into digital marketing since then and have adapted my own style from the different things that I have learned throughout my different ventures.

The following is a synopsis for any business professional to follow when creating a website to make sure that things are done in what I like to call “uniformity” and not just trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together without knowing what the final puzzle looks like when solved.

The following are things to consider.

SEO should be part and parcel of the website design and development process

You don’t want to plan and start implementing an SEO campaign after your website is developed.

The reason being is two-fold:

  1. The majority of website designers and developers know very little about SEO and at best they understand the bare minimum. SEO is more than just adding keywords to pages and optimizing title tags. Content creation plays an important role and not just fluff content thrown on a page without a purpose. I’m talking about well thought out content that is written to educate the consumer on the product or service that shapes and moulds the decision making process to getting them one step closer to purchasing.
  2. User experience plays a key role in SEO and is actually the component that harmonizes all the different ranking factors. If visitors are coming to your site but are thrown off by the wacky colors or wishy-washy content on page, what do you think they are inclined to do? Leave. If the visitor is not on your website than none of the ranking factors matter. That’s why SEO shouldn’t be treated as secondary to website development and should be included within the blueprint of development.

The 3 main ranking factors to guide your website’s SEO development

With the plethora of Google ranking factors, I believe there are 3 major signals to consider when designing and building your site (and the keyword here, no pun intended on the word “keyword” for those SEO’s reading this, is “designing”):

  1. Bounce Rate - What percentage of visitors traffic to only one page on your site before leaving the site all together.
  2. User Interaction - How are visitors interacting on your site? Are they filling out contact forms, downloading pdfs, reading through your different blog posts, checking out the FAQ page and so forth.
  3. Dwell Time - This takes into consideration how long visitors stay on your site.

Being mindful of the experience you create

So what is good practice in planning the development of a site that has the foundation for good SEO?

The one roadmap is mindfulness.

Let me explain.

For purposes of illustration, let’s use as an example, your dream house.

Boom. You just built your dream house out of thin air. Just the way you always imagined it.

You’re most likely going to want to show it to some of your friends and family, right?

Well, when they come to your house and you greet them at the door, you’re going to want to tell them all the great things about your house and all the little things that make this house so great and hence the reason it’s your dream house.

You’re probably going to touch on every minute detail that makes you so excited about this new house of yours and you’ll be happy to shape the experience of their tour with the things you say.

Now, when your guests come in through the front door, you’re not going to take them blindfoldedly to your master bedroom first and then blind fold them again and then walk them to your basement. That would be kind of confusing to your guests as to the choice in navigation you took and might have them scratching their heads.

What you will do is most likely go in order from one room to another from the entryway in a logical and mapped out path and you will recite and talk of things in certain parts of the house to elevate the experience of your guests.

And so this analogy is not that different from your website.

You want to hit on all the things that make your product or service great, but you want to do it in a way that won’t have your visitor’s scratching their head.

Hence, you want to do it in a meaningful and clear-cut way.

Your website is therefore the personification of you as this tour guide in your dream house and you want to give the best tour of your product or service without you actually being there.

The foundational structure that leads to good SEO

With that said here are pointers to consider when planning the development of your site.

Each page on your website should be targeting a certain keyword. This keyword should be in your title tag, url, h1 tag and sprinkled a few times throughout the content. Preparing your keywords before the design process lines you up for victory as the design of the site can be tailored to hit on points that will move the needle in SEO success.

Have a solid base of robust and well to do content for every page of your site. As a side note: content length of 1,000 words or more tends to attract more links and shares.

Your site should be created with a sophisticated CMS (Content Management System) so it is easy to publish posts. The design of the blog should be clean and simple yet captivating.

If you want to lead the visitor to want to take some kind of action i.e. download white paper, submit email address to receive an e-book on so-and-so, include a CTA. Bottomline, this CTA, should be unobtrusive and should be giving something of value that would help your visitor in making a decision.

These pages will serve as assets in inbound marketing and support your content outreach efforts down the line to establish your brand’s digital earned presence and domain authority.

The point of it all

Any body with a fresh pair of eyes could see how the quality in design in anything evolves over time. From clothing to cars to website design, people whether consciously or subconsciously respond and are affected by its whims.

We aren’t in the era of GeoCities any more, and so, it's not just a matter of keeping up appearances. That is not the point of this discussion. The point is to provide better and elevated website experiences through design all while securing a search engine dominancy.

SEO is hard. Isn’t it? Most marketers and brands literally spend millions of dollars every year to get better results from SEO.

Why? The reason is simple: search traffic is the best traffic source as you can attract high quality leads, sales and visitors to your site.

Spending more budget on SEO is not going to work unless you’re doing FEW things right. Find out what works better and do it more often - that’s how you achieve success.

If you’re struggling to get better results with SEO and looking for proven ways to build a high traffic website in 2019 and beyond, here are 3 incredible SEO tactics for you.

3 Powerful Ways to Build A High Traffic Website With SEO

1. Target a low search volume keyword

If you’re still not doing “proper keyword research”, you’re doing a big mistake. Every keyword is different.

For example,

Which one do you think is better to target?

If you said the second keyword with around 1000 monthly searches, you’ve better knowledge about keyword research.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t target a high volume keyword but in most of the cases, high volume keywords are targeted by authority sites, big brands (you might also see a ton of people bidding PPC ads for those keywords).

It means, you’ll find a ton of competition for high volume keywords? Why? Because everyone wants to rank for such keywords. That’s the reason why you should avoid high volume keywords.

So what type of keywords should you target?

[bctt tweet="Focus on finding long tail keywords. Make sure to pick long tail keywords with low search volume." username="relevance"]

Here are few quick yet most effective tips you can use while doing keyword research to find traffic generating keywords.

Keep an eye on your competitors: Go to Google and search for your target keywords or topics. Take a look at all the SERP results on the first page of Google. The top 10 search results are your competition. Find out what are they missing? What can you do better to create 10x better content?

The key here is to find their top performing keywords which are generating them the most amount of organic traffic. Then, make a list of all the topics you can cover around those keywords on your blog too. 

Find and use LSI keywords: LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are literally the synonym of a primary keyword or topic you want rank for. The best part about using LSI keywords is that they are extremely helpful especially when you’re creating in-depth content because you can include a ton of keyword variations for particular topic.

You can easily find and start using LSI keywords which are highly relevant to your target keyword term. You can use tools like LSI Graph, SEMrush etc to easily come up with dozens of LSI keyword ideas for your target keywords. 

Focus on the right keyword metrics: While doing keyword research, it’s essential for you to focus on the right keyword metrics such as: 

You should pick a keyword research tool that helps you find all the above keyword metrics accurately. Check out tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs as they provide you with a ton of keyword data.

2. Optimize your content for RankBrain

Did you know that RankBrain is Google’s 3rd most important ranking signal? Yes, after content and backlinks, RankBrain is the most important ranking factor.

RankBrain is AI (Artificial Intelligence) program that helps Google process and understand search queries. RankBrain mainly looks at the following 2 important user metrics.

Let’s talk about the above 2 terms so you can understand them better to optimize your content for RankBrain.

  1. Dwell Time: Dwell time tells you how long a visitor stays on your site (at an average, ~3 minutes is a good dwell time). You can easily find your website’s page dwell time by logging into your Google Analytics account (“average time on page” is what dwell time).

Did you know that, by increasing your website’s dwell time, you can also increase your search engine rankings for particular pages? Yes, that’s true. So many studies show that dwell time is also a ranking signal by Google which helps you increase your organic rankings.

If you’re wondering how to increase it, here are few incredible tips to increase your website’s overall dwell time:

Increase your website speed: The first thing people notice on your site is your website page loading times. If your site is taking too much time to load, most people just abandon your site without thinking much (and probably visit your competitors sites for the same reason).

[bctt tweet="Increasing your website speed dramatically improves your website dwell time too. It increases your overall search rankings and user experience." username="relevance"]

That’s why it’s essential to have a faster loading website and make sure to improve your page loading times to 1 to 2 seconds. You can move to a faster and better hosting, use a CDN, limit your plugins usage, optimize your images size etc to improve your loading times.

Include internal links: Don’t underestimate the power of internal links as they are really significant in improving your search rankings. They also help you with deeper site crawling apart from increasing your website’s overall dwell time. 

Also make sure to attract more comments on your blog posts. That way, your dwell time for the particular page definitely goes up because people are spending more time on typing a comment. 

Embed videos: One of the most effective ways to increase your page dwell time is to embed videos. For instance, if you’re creating a product review, while talking about all the features, you can also create a how to video showing how to use that product. Not only it improves your overall dwell time but also increases your sales and engagement for the product review.

  1. Organic Click Through Rate: Now, let’s talk about the 2nd most important factor in RankBrain which is organic CTR. Organic click through rates is the percentage of searchers who click on your search result.

[bctt tweet="The more clicks your blog posts attract from search, the better rankings they will get. It’s as simple as that." username="relevance"]

Here are few solid tips to increase your website’s organic CTR:

Write compelling titles: The #1 way to increase your organic CTR is to create click-worthy titles. Your title is the first thing people see in Google search results when they’re browsing something. 

You can use headline analyzer tools to easily test and analyze your headlines as there are few tools like CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, Sharethrough Headline Analyzer etc that help you with testing your headlines.

Create engaging meta description: You literally have around 150 characters to write a powerful meta description. It’s like a tweet. Make each and every word count while writing your meta description.

Make sure to tell your audience what they can expect from your search entry before they even click on your link.

Pro tip: If you’re a WordPress user, make sure to install the #1 WordPress optimization plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast. It’s free and extremely easy to use which helps you easily optimize your blog posts for your target keywords.

Implement schema markup: Implement schema markup especially when you’re writing product reviews as you can easily show star ratings under your title i.e within your meta description.

Not only it makes your search entry unique but also attracts more clicks organically. You can use plugins like Author hReview to easily implement schema markup.

3. Create in-depth and authoritative content

Whether you know it or not, more than 3 million blog posts are published every single day.

That’s a ton of articles, right? That’s true. So what’s your chances of getting first page rankings for your target keyword?

Almost zero if you’ve thin content. So what’s the point of publishing new blog posts if they are not bringing you any results from search engines like Google.

If you really want to get more search traffic to your blog posts, make them authoritative. Make your content evergreen. Create content that’s better than your competitors. Make sure it covers A to Z information about the topic you’re talking about.

That’s how will you rank. That’s how you can get more social shares, comments, backlinks and so on.

Here are few amazing tips to create highly authoritative content no matter what niche you are in:

Spend more time doing research: The key to creating authoritative and highly useful content is to spend more time on research. Google everything that’s related to the topic you’re going to cover and make sure to reach each and every piece of content that’s already ranking in the first page results of Google search.

Always create long form of articles: Gone are the days where you can get first page rankings on Google by publishing 300 to 500 word articles. You’re not Seth Godin! Long form of contents which contain 2000+ words are getting better search rankings along with the social shares.

Add references, data and illustrations: The difference between an ordinary post and extraordinary post is the “data and visualization”. Creating authoritative content is possible only when you link to credible sources and data. So don’t hold back when you’re linking to authority sites in your niche and also make sure to add as many images and illustrations as possible to make your content look more promising.

Create timeless content: Profitable blogging is a long term strategy. So it’s always a smart idea to focus on finding and creating “timeless contents” so they will be useful to your target audience even after a couple of years.

The great thing about picking timeless topics is, you can update them whenever you want even after a few years. Just make sure to use a short and optimized URL so it can be beneficial even in the long run.

Final thoughts on improving your search traffic in 2019

Improving your website’s search traffic is an art. Although SEO is not a rocket science but you need to implement few tactics to make it work.

Creating highly engaging content, improving your organic click through rate along with overall dwell time, targeting the right keywords can really help you build a high traffic website in 2019 and beyond.

So what are your thoughts? Did you find the above mentioned SEO tactics useful?

In Search Engine Optimization, links that either send visitors to your site, or links that you send visitors to, are referred to as backlinks.

In the early days of the internet, backlinks formed the backbone of rankings on search engines. The internet has matured quite a bit since then, but backlinks still remain a fundamental part of ranking on any website.

The need for a solid backlink strategy, especially for e-commerce websites, is important. If you haven’t optimized your backlinks in a while, you’re missing out on a lot of analytics data to find where your best traffic is coming from.

Backlink strategies for e-commerce websites

Unlike blogging sites, e-commerce websites are fundamentally different when it comes to search engine optimization: it’s much harder to generate new links for them but here’s a solid five-step plan that will create a solid foundation to get you on your feet.

1. Make A Really Attractive Website

User interface and experience are pretty important. While making your site look aesthetically pleasing may not be too challenging, dealing with links is a little bit trickier. You might need a professional. With e-commerce backlinks, there are a few nooks and crannies you need to look into and areas you shouldn’t ignore.

The first method of link building can be approached in several ways. The most common is creating a product review form that customers can sign after ever purchase and place their reviews on your site.

Your blog can also feature backlinks by having testimonials links placed in your articles. This is easy because it only takes a few minutes, and you can even earn a link back if customers or bloggers feature you on their own blog or website.

Depending on your website, you can have at least one listing page on your website and reap heavily from it. An example of this could be Craigslist or Yelp. Your landing page is the ultimate tool for conversion. Whether you run ad-campaigns or you bring in traffic through backlinks, a high-converting landing page is a must.

Internal links are those that lead a visitor from one page to another on your own domain. Believe it or not, you can improve your SEO position by linking yourself. Besides, they are also useful because they keep people on your site for longer. When writing a blog post, don’t overlook any opportunity to link to older posts.

Various tools and companies exist online to take care of the idle market that is expired domains. Via companies like Ahrefs, your site can be featured on the landing page of an expired domain relevant to your niche rather than sitting idle.

This trusted method has been known to produce as much as 110% increases in traffic. A broken link, like the name suggests, is a link that doesn’t lead anywhere. Having too many of these on your site will see it tumble from search engine rankings.

To take care of it, try and reach out to website owners and see if they can fix it, and, if possible, link back to your site.

2. Optimized for voice queries using long tail keywords

With 65 million voice-first devices currently in circulation, almost double the 33 million number from a year before, the need for better voice optimization should be pretty apparent. The implications of these numbers are quite wide-ranging.

The most important of these is the fact that searches are now significantly longer and more conversational. This creates the opportunity for using long tail keywords, which can conveniently double up as backlinks.

3. Guest posting for backlinks with large sites

 

A more traditional way of getting things done is collaborating with large sites and getting them to post links that feature your site on theirs. There are probably a number of sites online that specialize in your particular niche and allow guest posting.

Guest posting is often considered the most effective method because its benefits are twofold. Should you get a high caliber authoritative site and produce quality content, you get both exposure and a quality backlink. Monitor your backlink profile regularly with a quality backlink tracker tool.   

4. Collaborate your Product to Influential Bloggers

Another method that will require a bit of work on your side is blogger outreach. This is essentially reaching out to an influential blogger and leveraging their fanbase to generate exposure for yourself.

Despite the billions invested in marketing every year, referrals by trusted people is still the most powerful marketing strategy out there. According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust referrals from people they know and are 77% more likely to spend money on a product as a result.

This will involve finding the right kind of influencer - preferably someone that’s well-known within your niche - and build a formal relationship with them.

Once you’ve gotten past the initial phase and agreed upon the kind of content you should produce, try and get other influential people in your niche in it. Even a few words quoting them will do. Afterwards, get the article to approve and keep track of the referrer section in your analytics.

5. Conduct audio, video and written interviews with influential individuals

 

Interviewing influential people in your niche has always been a great way to get authoritative backlinks. A lot of great sites spend a significant amount of resources and time - often an entire blog post - on a single interview. Blogs that are backed up by a podcast or reading services like Curio can benefit a great deal from audio interviews.

The same goes for brands with a video channel on video platforms like YouTube. If you’re able to secure even one backlink from them, it may turn out to be the big boost that your brand needs.

Unfortunately, things don’t always work out the same way. Often, it’s pretty difficult to secure a whole interview with an influencer - they will only be able to get them to answer a question at a time.

If you’re able to get several influencers to answer different single questions, it’s possible to quote them and round them all up into a single post, getting as many as 20 authoritative backlinks.

If possible, share the link with them afterward and see if they can share it with their followers through their social media accounts and their blog. They don’t necessarily need to promote your online store. You may request them to talk about the ‘value addition’ that your store provides and the discounts or offers that you come up with from time to time.

Conclusion

Backlinking is still a very dominant strategy for getting more traffic on the modern internet. Considering just how far back this SEO tool roots, it is understandable when some backlinking strategies from the early days no longer work.

It might be time to re-evaluate if you really need your site on directory forums and so on, for example. The main thing to remember, though, is that despite everything, the most surefire way to get to the top is to update your content regularly.

The internet is an emotional world. Wonder why?

Look at top trending stories. Facebook newsfeed. Twitter timeline. Instagram pictures. The whole internet is a treasure trove someone’s emotion. Take any page and you will see how diverse it is in the form of emotions.

[bctt tweet="Joy. Sadness. Support. Hatred. Approval. Disappointment. You can find all hues of human emotions like a colorful palette on the internet." username="relevance"]

But, hey how does it relate to search engine ranking. What do positive and negative emotions go to do with rankings?

Turns out, everything. The adage that any publicity is good publicity does not stand true anymore. If you have negative publicity, it is going to affect your brand’s search rankings.

Positive coverage like a press release, fan blogs, positive reviews, etc. are going to shed a positive influence on your search rankings.

Believe it or not, Google already has a patent for it. It is called sentiment analysis and is used to determine whether a review that you have written is a happy one an unhappy one. When combined with Google’s growing processing power and massive datasets, it is only a matter of time before everything that is written on the internet will be rated as positive or negative by Google.

Emotions and their effect on local SEO

For any business, local SEO plays a major role in bringing in business. If you have your local SEO signals consisting of NAP (Name, address and phone number) correct, customers in your locality will be able to find you easily.

[bctt tweet="Local SEO is what enables your business to collect online customer reviews as well. And therein comes the importance of positive and negative emotions." username="relevance"]

When customers leave reviews on your Google profile or any other review submission website, Google tracks it down like any other SEO-optimized page. The fact that these reviews are user-generated and are enriched with signals like authenticity and passion makes it even more reliable for Google.

Google uses what is known as ‘stylometry’ - statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another to evaluate the emotional quotient of a review.

And, it is not just Google reviews that are in focus. Even websites like Yelp and other local directories are used for local SEO ranking.

Monitoring customer emotions

I agree that sounds a bit privacy-intruding. But, there is a purpose for this question. Are you listening to the reviews and content that your customers write about your business offerings? Do you have a process of monitoring brand mentions or reviews that your business gets?

In SEO, there is a concept which deals with this. According to the concept, keywords can be classified into branded keywords and non-branded keywords.

Branded keywords - keywords that have your business/product name as prefix or suffix. They have limited search volume but have high search intent and convert better.

Non-branded - Generic keywords related to your product/service with a huge volume and hence difficult to rank for. Brings in loads of traffic but conversion rates fluctuate drastically.

So, all the content that is published with branded keywords is picked by Google for sentiment analysis. Depending on the positive or negative emotion, the ranking is offered.

The challenge here is, ranking for negative content means you are literally losing business to customers.

[bctt tweet="Creating a positive relationship seems a legit way of winning Google’s favor than creating negative link bait." username="relevance"]

In other words, bad publicity is not going to good publicity, not any longer. Always focus on building positive coverage that will put you on the good books of Google.

Search engine optimization is one of the quintessential ways you can rank high for organic search traffic (mostly from Google), but in terms of the bigger marketing picture - SEO itself is a means to an end. Knowing how to get traffic to your website is the main goal here, it’s the foundation.

Because, you’re not really going to have any conversion rates if you don’t have any traffic in the first place.

Once you have a solid amount of following and a fair amount of traffic flowing to your website, you can then focus on retaining that said traffic and converting it into sales.

Without traffic, you won’t go anywhere - in terms of SEO, growth, sales, and more.

It’s the building blocks of your website and the growth of your business.

And for that - SEO is not the only way.

In this guide, we’ll be looking at a few tactics and marketing strategies you can implement in your business to attract, and retain organic traffic - without relying on SEO.

Let’s begin!

1.  Social media

If you’re not on social media - you’re missing out.

Missing out on learning about your target market, high engagement, having an additional platform to advertise your product or service on, and much, much more.

Regardless of your industry, you need to be where your customers are. You need to be there, engage them, contribute value, and establish yourself as an expert in the field. Only then will you be rewarded.

In other words, give before you ask (or “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”).

How does this apply to social media?

Well, think about how people use social media. 

What’s the first thing most people check whenever they wake up? 

Chances are, your customers use social media from their phones every day, but give attention and love only to a select few brands. They’re bombarded with ads and brands asking for “likes” every day of their lives, but customers only support the brands they resonate with.

To establish a caring relationship with your customers, you have to show that you care.

And social media is the best place to do so. Treat them like people. Take the time out of your day to appreciate them. Give them value that’s educating and entertaining - and it’s only a matter of time until they fall in love with your brand.

This takes times time and more importantly, consistency. The brands who have garnered their customers’ love and affection have been at it for some time. It takes patience for it to pay off. 

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg of the social media giant. The truth is, there are many platforms - you can’t be on there all.

So, the question you need to ask yourself is - where is my audience? 

Go there. Establish yourself as a valuable presence and gather a following before asking for anything. If they enjoy your content, they’ll enjoy your offerings as well.

2. Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a small part of your bigger inbound marketing strategy and an essential one as far as building relationships and discovering new audiences go. 

This tactic is also equally useful if you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of visitors to begin with.

When blogging, you want authority, qualified and relevant traffic, engagement, motivated leads and more. But it can be hard to get all of that when you don’t have an established following.

So, where do you find a relevant audience within your niche who wants to get to know you more? 

First, you look for blogs in the same niche as you, and then outreach to them, saying how much you enjoy their website and content, and that you would love to do a guest post swap with them. 

To do this, try googling “name of your niche” + “submit guest post” or “best blogs”, and then do outreach to them.

If you already have some following - that’s even better as the target blog would be more likely to do a swap with you. In this case, both of you are exchanging audiences and introducing them to relevant content.

You should be aiming for a win-win situation so that everyone involved (including each others’ audiences) benefit in the guest blog. While it might seem that you’re promoting a competitor and sending traffic their way - they’re doing the same for you, hence the reason it’s a win-win situation.

The challenge here, however, is to produce engaging and high-quality content that will make your new audience want to stay on your website and get to know you better.

You need to make sure people are actually reading your content.

Source: KOMarketing

There are two ways to do this:

First, make sure your content is actually great (original, easy to read, answers the question, etc.) so that your new found audience will want to stay on your website.

And secondly, be sure to include a strong call-to-action at the end (subscribe to a newsletter, book a demo, where they can find more information about you, so on), so that you retain the traffic.

To recap, with guest blogging, if done well, you should be targeting a whole new audience with your content and drawing them back to your site). Once they’re back, make sure everything is well optimized and the user experience is there.

3. Be active on Forums

If you can’t attract traffic to your site, go and engage them where they hang out.

Be it Stackexchange, Quora, or the relevant subreddit, get out there and start writing compelling answers to problems your users face within your niche.

Like with social media, this tactic only works if you do it consistently, as the more you answer, the more followers you’ll gain. Additionally, it’s a long-term strategy, only if you do it often and write high-quality answers each time, will you be rewarded with followers and new visitors. 

And if you do it long enough, your answers can even go viral - which is all it might take for you to become recognized as an expert in your field.

Quora specifically is a very powerful platform because you’re sure to find people there within all niches. The website also happens to rank high on Google with a lot of questions, so, essentially, you’re getting the direct traffic from people on Quora (referral traffic), in addition to those finding your answer through Google (organic traffic).

To be successful on forums (whether it be Quora, Stackexchange, something else), make sure your profile is fully filled in and optimized so that people going there for the first time know what to expect. Make sure your title reflects what you do and your summary includes a link back to your site.

If someone likes your answer and goes back to your profile, they should have enough information on what you do and where they can read more about you or your business. Once they end up back on your website - you need to make sure they stay there.

Leveraging Quora traffic takes a lot of time and persistence. But if you’re a business owner, it’s also a great place to learn more about your target market.

The real power of online forums is finding your people and getting involved. The best thing though is that they’re free and you can learn more about your target audience. 

Once you get to know them better and start interacting with them - you’ll gain more followers and have an additional place to promote your content on.

Conclusion

All in all, this post is not to undermine the strength of SEO - it’s still an essential digital marketing tactic, and ideally, you should also be using that in addition to a mix of the above.

But it's important you know how to drive organic traffic to your website and that you don’t rely only on one tactic (e.g. SEO). If the Google algorithm changes and SEO is your primary source of traffic - this could be the end of your business.

To avoid that, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. By implementing a mix of marketing tactics to attract and retain traffic - you can be at peace knowing your traffic is here to stay.

And if one source of traffic fails you, you’ll have others to keep your peace of mind.

Traffic is essential for all businesses. But how you go about attracting it to your website can determine your worth. 

So, as long as you’re trying different growth hacking tactics on how you can attract and regain traffic by offering high-quality content - then your business is on the right track!

A website that is not ranking in search engines like Google is just like a motorcycle that refuses to start.

It doesn’t matter how good your content or website design is, if your website is not ranking well in Google, you’re not going to get any results.

There could be a lot of reasons for a website not to rank well in Google search results. In this post, we’ll talk about five of the major reasons why your site is not ranking in Google and we’ll also discuss about how you can fix those issues.

Are you ready?

Why Your Website Is Not Ranking In Google (And How to Fix It)

1. You’re not optimizing at all

The #1 reason most websites don’t rank in Google is because they are not optimized for any keywords or topics whatsoever. How can people find your website if your site is not optimized for anything at all?

Target a few keywords that are relevant to your website to be found on search engines like Google. Otherwise, you’re not going to get any search traffic. It’s as simple as that.

How to fix this issue?

Here are few powerful ways to optimize your website and contents for better search results. 

Optimize your website contents for featured snippets: Google is showing more inclination towards Google featured snippets. A featured snippet is a format developed by Google to provide users with a concise and direct answer to their questions.

That way, they will get an idea about their search query without having to click through to a specific result on Google search results. It saves time for Google searchers and nearly 26% of all clicks will be generated to #1 ranking page with a featured snippet.

According to Ahrefs, 99.58% of the featured snippets are already in the top 10 positions in Google.

That means, if you want to rank for featured snippets, get into the top 10 positions in Google search results first. To get into the first page of Google, you need to start targeting low competitive keywords, write unique and highly engaging content, build quality links and so on.

Learn on page optimization: One of the simplest yet most effective ways to get better organic rankings is to learn how to do proper on page optimization. Once you pick a primary keyword for a page, you need to include it in several places including your title tag, meta description, URL, image alt tag etc to improve the “keyword visibility”.

If you’re using WordPress, you can install plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast or Rank Math to easily optimize your blog posts for your target keyword terms.

2. You’re not building backlinks

Did you know that Google takes over 200 factors into consideration while ranking a website? Yes, there are 200 ranking factors in Google that determine search rankings.

Out of those 200 ranking factors, there are 2 major factors that heavily impact your rankings which are;

Having great content helps but backlinks are essential for any website to build authority. You need to build high quality backlinks to your site and also keep an eye on your website’s backlink profile to remove toxic backlinks.

How to fix link building issues?

If you’re wondering about how to build quality and relevant links to your site, here are few proven SEO link building strategies for you.

Write for other sites: Guest posting is probably the most simplest yet powerful way to build quality and relevant backlinks to your site. Create a list of 10 to 20 websites in your niche, find their top performing blog posts and create a guest post on related topics.

Do expert roundups and interviews: It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, you can find influential bloggers or marketers in your niche. Start reaching out to them and make efforts to conduct interviews with them as they go viral online. Besides interviews, you can also do roundups on a particular or trending topic by inviting a handful of bloggers to share their views.

Once your interviews or roundup posts go live, you can ask the attendees to share or link to your contents. Most of them will do if your content is highly engaging and useful to their target audience.

Write on Quora: Quora is a great platform especially for bloggers and all kinds of marketers. Although Quora doesn’t provide you dofollow backlinks but the links are still valuable. Besides backlinks, Quora helps you with a ton of things including providing more exposure to your content, traffic to your site, reaching out to new audience and the list goes on.

3. Your website is painfully slow

Slow loading websites not only kill conversions but they affect your overall search rankings as Google gives top priority to page loading times.

Google takes your website speed into consideration when ranking your site and if you’re struggling to rank your site in Google search, it might be mainly because of your website speed.

According to a research conducted by Akamai found that 47% of people expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds and that 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

How to fix this issue?

If you’re wondering about how to speed up your website to improve your overall search rankings, here are few proven tips for you.

Move to a faster web host: Most people host their sites on shared hosting environments because shared hosting is extremely cheap but it is also the main reason why your site is slow. Why? In a shared hosting environment, you share your hosting resources like CPU, disk space, RAM and so on with other sites hosted on the same server.

It directly impacts your website speed. That’s the reason why you should consider VPS or dedicated hosting if you’re looking for super fast website speeds since there will be fewer sites hosted across these environments.

To put it simply, if you’re using VPS hosting, you have your own dedicated portions of the server’s resources.

Shrink image sizes: As website owners, we use a ton of images and we upload them to our website without worrying about image sizes. If you’re not reducing your images size, you’re going to put a lot of burden on your databases and they are also the reason for slower page loading times.

So make sure to use online compressor tools or use a WordPress plugin called WP Smush it to easily shrink your image sizes before you even upload on to your WordPress dashboard.

4. Check your website’s mobile version

Not only Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor but smartphone users are increasing every single day. In 2019, if your site is not mobile responsive yet, you’re going to lose a ton of customers and conversions.

Make sure your site is correctly showing up on mobiles such as your iPhone, Android and even tablets. If you are still wondering why you need a mobile responsive design for your website, here are few benefits.

Also make sure to find whether your site is getting indexed in Google or not. See if your website has been indexed by searching for its exact URL or domain name with no other words (or you can also enter search terms like sitename:yourblogname.com).

How to fix this issue?

Firstly, use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool to see if your web pages are mobile responsive or not by entering your website URL. This tool helps you easily find whether your site is mobile-friendly or not and also tells if it has any loading time related issues.

You can also start browsing your site through a smartphone and see if all your pages are loading fine or not. You can also cross check your website across various devices including tablets, iPhones etc to see how your site looks.

If your site is not mobile responsive, you might want to get a mobile responsive theme or if you’re on WordPress, install plugins like WP Touch to automatically adds a mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website.

5. Your site might have incurred a Google penalty

If you’re doing everything right and still not seeing any increase in your search traffic and rankings, your website might have incurred a Google penalty. Google makes around 500 changes every year to provide better experience to the users.

It ultimately results in penalizing a ton of websites every time they roll a new update such as Panda, Penguin updates. A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website's search rankings based on updates from Google.

You can easily find whether your site is penalized by Google by performing detailed site audits and you can use tools like SEMrush.

You can also do a quick Google search with the search strings “site:yourdomain.com + keyword” to see if it yields any results or not. Also, if your site traffic suddenly drops down by 20 to 30% of even more overnight, it might be mostly due to a penalty.

How to fix a Google penalty?

If your website is hit by any Google updates such as Panda, Penguin etc, here are few tips to fix this issue.

Stop buying links and avoid duplicate content issues: We all know link building is the surefire way to increase search traffic but if you’ll be penalized if you're using platforms like Fiverr to buy cheap quality links.

Also make sure your content is completely original and unique (use tools like Copyscape to check plagiarism related issues on your site). Keep your titles and meta descriptions unique and make sure to do a quick search on Google before you publish a title for your blog posts.

Avoid keyword stuffing: Gone are the days where you can get first page rankings for a keyword by stuffing it again and again on your pages. Stop doing keyword stuffing. It’s not going to help you in anyway. In fact, it might lead you to a Google penalty.

Instead of keyword stuffing, find LSI keywords (relevant keywords to your primary keyword) and sprinkle them throughout your page. That way, you can get rankings for multiple keywords.

Apart from the above, stop cloaking links. Stop selling links to unnatural sites. Stop user-generated spam and always keep an eye on your comments and remove spam comments as soon as you find them.

Final thoughts about improving your website rankings in Google

SEO is not hard. You just need to learn and implement few KEY strategies such as doing proper keyword research, backlink building, on page optimization and so on and your website definitely gets better rankings.

Did you find any of the reasons mentioned above for the lack of your website search traffic? If yes, try to fix them as soon as possible to improve your organic rankings and search traffic.

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, right? Perhaps it is time to take the competition to the next level and use it in your advantage. One of the simplest ways of crushing your competitors is to analyze Google,  what they are doing, and do it even better.

Sounds simple, right? After all how hard could “Monkey See, Monkey Do” be?

In reality, it can be quite difficult to understand what exactly your competitors are doing. For one thing, where do you even begin to look? Is it the same for all sites old and new? How do you carry out a competitor analysis?

This blog is going to answer all these questions for you. We have seven simple, actionable, and repeatable competitor analysis methods to outrank your competition using their own tactics.

Without any further ado, let us jump right into these seven golden ways to rank on Google using competitor analysis:

Analyze their Keywords

Keywords are really important and everyone in the SEO industry knows this. The only real question is - How do we know which keywords to use?

Well, thankfully, someone else is already ranking on Google for your services or products. Why not take a quick look at what keywords they are ranking for?

How can you find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for?

There are three ways to do this. Are you ready? Let’s dive right into it:

Using a simple spreadsheet and doing some hard work, you can easily find out the keywords that your biggest competitors are using to drive traffic to their websites and landing pages. All you need to do is have your content and on-page SEO specialist team to meaningfully optimize your contents and pages around these keywords.

Unveil your competitors’ marketing secrets from SEMrush. Just enter their website to get a customized report. It’s free.

Analyze their Design

The flow of a website’s design says a lot about the business. If your competition has a clumsy, complicated navigation menu and a bunch of meaningless buttons that seem to disrupt the flow of the sales process, you immediately know that you can do better.

If one of your competitors has a seamless UX, you can simply copy their idea and start building your site’s design around it.

But how do you know if the UX of the competitor websites is worth copying?

Here is a simple solution - Ask yourself these three questions:

Of course, there are always some websites where you can tell just by looking at it that the UX is horrible. But if you like to get technical about it, then these three questions will help you a lot.

What else can you learn from the competitor’s site design besides its UX?

You get a great idea about the kind of contents that have been most effective for them.

From even a cursory glance, you can tell the type of contents used most frequently as well as its usage and positioning. But we will get to that right after this in just a minute.

You can also take a quick look at the quality of graphics work used on the website and pages. Now you have a place to start benchmarking the look and feel of your site.

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Analyze their Contents

A quick search on Google will tell you that not all keywords are meant for all kinds of contents. In some cases, you see ranking service pages, in other cases, you get ranking blogs.

The type of content that is already ranking will give you a nice measure of what to do on your website.

Now, how do you measure effective content?

For one thing, you can use Alexa to check out the traffic on that site. If a piece of content has a lot of traffic, then you know that it must be doing something right!

Similarly, using Buzzsumo and its domain filtering feature you can analyze and gauge the social media influence of your competitors’ contents. This certainly lets you unearth a lot of valued data that help you devise a better content development and marketing strategy.

You could also bypass the entire process by using AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools to benchmark your content quality by comparing it with other pieces of content directly. MarketMuse does this really well. All you need is the URL to your article and the seed keyword. The AI pretty much does the rest!

What are you looking for in your competitor’s web contents?

If you can correctly assess these fundamental things, there is no way to stop you from outranking your business rivals. When you have multiple on-page analysis tools available on the internet, you can consider learning SEO in order to carry on it efficiently.

Unveil your competitors’ marketing secrets from SEMrush. Just enter their website to get a customized report. It’s free.

Audit their On-Page SEO

Good content without proper on-page optimization is like sailing in the ocean without a compass.

A proper content optimization amplifies contents’ organic ranking, boosts its visibility, and increases traffic to the website. Therefore, apart from analyzing the contents, likewise you should audit the on-page SEO of your competitors.

You can do it manually; alternatively, there are a lot of site audit tools that you can use to conduct an extensive audit to discern the errors of your competitor websites.

The objective should be, not to repeat the same mistakes that your competitors have committed, and do the things better than them.

Things to check;

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Analyze their Backlinks

Backlinks form the A of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust), but getting high-quality links from contextually appropriate pages can be a huge challenge.

Now, there are lots of ways to go about link building, but one of the most common ways is competitor analysis.

But how does knowing your competitors’ backlinks help you?

First of all, finding out a list of backlinks pointing to your competitor webpages will help you find similar backlinks that you can try and acquire for your site. For instance, if your competitor is using guest blogs, you can also use guest blogs from the same site or a different one.

What backlink strategies can you form using this tactic?

There are lots of other link building strategies you can try and explore as well. But this should be a great starting point for you.

Moz Link Explorer tool can help you execute a lot of this. Additionally, you may use Google search operators to manually analyze your competitions to find out new linking opportunities.

Analyze their Social Clout

competitors and google

Social clout is the extent of your social media reach. A simple way to promote your content is via social media to the people who are already following your existing competition.

Why is social-media-reach even relevant to organic ranking and SEO?

Social media can funnel a lot of traffic to your website that is highly targeted. This kind of traffic will usually stay a long time on your website and view several pages. Because of the longer stay-time, page-views, and other user-engagements; Google will give your content a serious boost in the organic rankings.

Lots of SEO veterans have speculated that social engagements have a lot to do with the organic ranking of websites.

Knowing what your competition is doing on social media sites can help you create killer content and engage with your prospects. More importantly, you can easily find your entire customer base right there!

You can also engage with influencers and seriously boost your traffic in a very short period of time.

Unveil your competitors’ marketing secrets from SEMrush. Just enter their website to get a customized report. It’s free.

Analyze their Local Citations

competitors and google

Local Citations or NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) help you rank for local searches. In simple words, NAP citations help you get into the top of Google Local Box.

Now, there are a couple of ways to build NAP citations.

You can use business directory listings, and local magazine features; the trick is to hyper-local very quickly.

But, finding places to build NAP citations can take a lot of time. However, if you have access to your competitors’ NAP citations, you can replicate those for your website’s local SEO easily.

Simply using search operators, you can find out a lot of places where your competitors have built their NAP.

“competitor-address” intext: competitor-phone AND intext:competitor-brand-name -site: competitor-domain.com

Over to You:

Now, after conducting a complete competitor analysis, you should have a list of things in your mind to improve your site’s organic ranking and overall performance.

Better you jot down those somewhere and start correcting the key things one after the other. If you are making any big changes in your design or contents, don’t forget to let Google know about that. Use the Search Console tool to inform that right after the change.

Similarly, if you are considering changing one URL for its better optimization, finally make sure to redirect the old URL to the new URL using the 301 permanent redirection.

Certainly, these are not the all, but an in-depth competitor analysis can uncover a lot of other details that you can use in your advantage to stay two steps ahead of your competitors with help from Google.

I’ve always loved teaching.

There’s something exciting about sharing ideas with others. To see someone else’s lightbulb moment is such a feeling of accomplishment for both me and the other person.

Although I love teaching, it’s not my official title. But as a professional SEO, some days it feels like I’m playing the role of an educator instead of a vendor for my clients.

I never get weary of explaining what, exactly, I do, and how that helps my clients. I see the chance to educate as an opportunity to connect with my clients. That means a better relationship—and long-term work.

I believe that SEOs have a greater duty beyond optimizing meta descriptions. Not only do we have to be savvy and up-to-date as SEOs. We also carry the responsibility of educating our clients.

Why?

Because clients need to understand why SEO is valuable. When clients understand SEO, they can appreciate and value our work.

Our livelihoods as SEO practitioners depend on our ability to teach and demonstrate value.

Knowledge is power

I don’t have to tell you that SEO is important. But you’ve probably had to explain your worth every time you sit down with a new client.

Exhausting, isn’t it?

I know SEOs have a lot going on. But, in addition to our technical skills, we also have to improve our client management skills.

You can’t send a client an email or video and expect it to educate them. SEO education has to be tailored to each client’s individual needs. You even have to tailor your language to fit which department you’re speaking with.

Trust me, the dev team and marketing team have very different goals for SEO.

When it comes to your clients, SEO knowledge is power. Take the time to educate them. It requires more time, work, and occasionally the patience of a saint, but it’s worth the payoff.

Educate your clients to see a boost in three areas:

1. Trust

You’re the professional. The client hired you because of your expertise.

Even then, you need to continue building trust in your client relationships. One of the best ways to do so is through education.

Education shows that you know your stuff. Teaching gives transparency and openness, too. These help the client feel more comfortable working with you.

Translation: clients will keep you longer and give you more work.

2. Larger SEO agreements

There’s a dirty truth about SEO: sometimes we can’t prove what, exactly, led to an increase in rankings.

We struggle to demonstrate our quantifiable value to our clients. This goes double for new clients.

Show your clients how SEO works, and I guarantee you’ll see fewer clients demanding a first-page rank after a week of work.

This helps you build better relationships with informed clients who care about your value. When clients recognize your worth, they pay what you’re worth. As a result, you could score larger SEO agreements.

3. Improved client results

Yes, it’s true! Educating your clients will get them better results.

Because they understand why. Clients are much more likely to jump in and follow your guidance when they understand. Instead of telling them they need more backlinks, explain why backlinks are important.

I guarantee that your clients will have greater conviction and follow-through with a little education. And that frees you up to do even more behind-the-scenes SEO magic.

How I teach SEO to my clients

You might think, “I don’t have time to teach my clients SEO! Can’t they just watch a video or something?”

I get it. I know the frustration.

The good news is that it’s a lot easier to educate your clients with a set process. Here’s the process I follow to teach my clients about SEO.

Read the room

SEOs have to understand their clients’ personalities. Do they need to have the floor and talk more? Or do they just want to sit back and listen to my report?

Get to know your clients before you jump in with the SEO lessons. Cater to the client’s personality, communication preferences, and learning style.

You can’t take a one size fits all approach here. Tailor what you teach and how you teach to each client. This can make the difference between an effective relationship and a proposal that falls on deaf ears.

Hands-on approach

I take a very hands-on approach with my clients. I have biweekly calls with nearly every client.

Again, this isn’t something all SEOs do, but it’s important. A hands-on approach helps you build a relationship with your client.

The relationship helps you transcend the transactional nature of your project and builds a rapport. Over time, this means you have more clout to educate the client without coming across as a know-it-all.

No matter whether your client is a marketing agency or a plumbing company, they deserve white-glove service. That means building trust with regular communication and updates.

Increased communication gives you more opportunities to educate your clients. Answer questions as they pop up and preemptively explain the “why” behind your strategy.

The result will be better client follow through and better long-term outcomes.

Remove your assumptions

Don’t assume anything about what your clients do or don’t know.

You’re walking a fine line here. On one hand, you don’t want to insult your client by explaining very basic concepts. On the other, you don’t want to confuse them with an unfamiliar term.

Get on the same page with your client. I find it’s easiest to do this by asking what they know about SEO, and if they’ve used another SEO consultant in the past.

Use very high-level language and explain concepts at the beginning of your relationship. Over time you’ll see what your client knows and how to locate their blind spots.

Be as clear as possible

This is crucial. Clear communication helps your clients turn around and explain SEO concepts to other third parties, like their web developers.

It’s a bit like playing telephone. Understand that your client will need to communicate SEO concepts to other parties.

Avoid jargon whenever you can. Remember that your clients aren’t SEOs. Explain concepts at a high level without getting into a lot of detail.

Don’t overload your client with too much information at one time, either. Give them just enough information so they understand the task at hand. Too much information at one time can result in overload and confusion, undoing months of your hard work as a teacher. 

Educate leadership first

If you want to build enthusiasm for your SEO initiative (and you should!), target your client’s leadership first.

Leaders influence purchasing and policy decisions. They can easily make or break the success of your client’s SEO project.

Don’t fly blind when speaking to leaders. Build a defined path to success that you can show them. They want to see that you’re a trusted guide that will improve their bottom line.

Remember, cater every SEO plan to the business’s unique needs. Don’t base it on what you think they need. Spend your introductory meeting to understand the client’s goals and needs. Then tailor your plan to their goals and present it to leadership.

Conclusion

You probably didn’t become an SEO to be a teacher. But the fun thing about this job is that it constantly changes!

Any savvy SEO has to teach their clients today. Teach them the basics of SEO so they understand why your work is important.

Invest in client relationships built on mentorship and understanding. You’ll work harder, but the results will help you reap huge dividends, both for your business and your client.

While Google’s improving its image recognition algorithm, words are still the primary tools of finding anything on the web. That’s why keyword research is one of the major tasks for any marketer and blogger.

Tons of articles on this topic will give you various ideas on how to perform this activity to rank high on Google. Not that some of them are wrong, but the approaches may differ.

I’m not here to give you a detailed guide or step-by-step tutorial on keywords research. I will show you some upbeat tricks that may sometimes be overlooked by those in-depth guides instead.

These tips should make the research process easier for you and more deliberate.

What do you need keywords for

First, you have to get a clear vision of your goals. Is it your personal or corporate blog? Do you need keywords for your online store’s product and category pages?

Thus, if you run an online store, you have to take a closer look to search queries that “sell” something. It’s the “monetization-first” approach. To get your “seed” keywords here, you may start with the Amazon search. It has incredibly detailed categorization and may give you a set of keyword ideas right from the start.

Or you may go with the “niche down” approach to find keywords for the website content. Start with the broad definition of your category and then go “down” to a more specific definition of your idea.

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Put users first

Keywords for different pages will differ by user’s search intent. Website owners often forget about this idea behind the keyword research. That’s why they often choose keywords based on their metrics, not the search intent.

Google’s guidelines divide searcher’s intent into four categories:

Those categories may be segmented even more. E.g., in the “Know” query can a “Know simple,” search that includes Answer boxes that Google shows right in SERP. They don’t usually result in any clicks and thus are mostly useless for those website owners who need traffic.

Google’s statistics show that up to 15% of searches are new - they have never been performed before. It’s the so-called long-tail keywords that are extremely specific and have low search volume.

It means that you have to understand the goal of the search query, not guessing the exact search phrase.

Come up with keyword ideas

When you start searching for the keywords, try to guess what phrases real users may type into the search field to find your product or a piece of content. The best way is asking the users how would they search for it. But it’s not always possible.

Put yourself in your users' shoes. Pretend that you know nothing about the product or the content. Then drop a few of your search ideas into Google and see what results you get.

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E.g., if you sell coats, the best period for promoting your offer is the mid-season like spring. But if you type “buy spring coats” into the search, you will see that many results include searches for “spring jackets” too. Think of utilizing this search term, too.

But it’s only the beginning of your research. Look at the Related searches section under the search results. You will see how many different variants people are using to find coats for spring. Those related searches can make a great addition to your list.

Use valuable metrics

With wrong metric estimations, you may spend a lot of time researching and optimizing “wrong” keywords that don’t fit your page or don’t match your goals.

The first metric that website owners often treat wrong is the search volume. The main thing you should remember about the search volume is that it doesn’t equal clicks. In simple words, people don’t always click the search results they get for a particular keyword.

Google now has the “Answer box” in the search results where it shows the instant answer for the questions that it defines as “simple.” Usually, those are questions about the date or quick info about the event or a person (e.g., "donald trump age"). If people were just looking for the date of the upcoming Oscar 2019 ceremony, they might not click any of the results on the SERP.

That’s why you should always check other metrics like the clicks number or the traffic estimations to get the whole picture of the keyword. Dig deeper beyond the search volume and explore the SERP, context and the characteristics of a keyword to find rare gems. Only this way you get valuable and highly-targeted traffic.

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Use proper tools

Many years Google Keywords Planner was the primary keyword research tool for all SEOs. But there is one problem with it: it was created for AdWord campaigns and thus may give you wrong estimations about keyword metrics.

You must already notice that GKP altered the way you see keyword search volumes: now it shows them as a range, like “10K - 100K.”

These ranges are vast and actually won’t help you with choosing the best keyword for your page. Short example: if we take two keywords with the same range of search volume in GKP and check them in the advanced keyword research tool, we may see that the numbers are entirely different.

That’s why you shouldn’t solely rely on Google Keyword Planner data. Use additional tools that may help you to see the picture in detail.

Research your competitors

Your competitors are not your enemies. At least, they may be of help when it comes to keyword research. Since you’re sharing the same niche, you may use some of the keywords your competitors use.

Start with putting your seed keyword into Google and looking at what sites rank for those keywords. Those are your competitors. Check them in advanced tools like Ahrefs or Moz to get the list of their keywords.

You don’t need to focus on all the keywords your competitors are targeting, only those that bring them traffic, backlinks and help rank higher in SERPs. Studies show that one page can rank for thousands of keywords, so it’s good to create the content around the topic rather than the exact keyword. And use specific long-tail keywords if your optimizing product pages.

Revise your existing keywords

Websites that have already been around for some time already rank for a bunch of keywords. And those keywords can be a perfect way to start the keyword research or dig a bit deeper into the topic.

A “Search Analytics” report in Google Search Console is a primary source of information about the keywords your website already ranks for. You may take a look at the keywords that already help you rank in Top10 of SERP.

Dig a bit deeper and check the keywords that your pages rank for on positions from 11 to 20. It’s that second page of the Google SERP which people often mock as "the best place to hide a dead body." Those pages should be your primary focus for improvement and additional keyword research.

To Summarize

Of course, those tricks are just the tip of the iceberg called “keyword research.” Here I tried to give you unhackneyed ideas that you may not see in other all-in-one guides on the topic.

You’re probably aware that backlinks represent a critical component of digital marketing (and in particular, SEO). If you want to boost your online visibility, drive greater traffic to your website, and generate further leads, you need to develop an effective linking strategy.

The discrepancy in value between high-quality and low-quality backlinks can be hard to perceive but massive in its effect, so it’s vital for you to develop a thorough understanding of what separates the former from the latter.

The Marks of a High-Quality Backlink 

To be honest, the quality of one’s backlinks can be fairly subjective and open to interpretation. Google certainly hasn’t explained the ins and outs of its algorithms or how influential specific components might be … though the search giant has offered some generic advice.

Nonetheless, experienced marketers and SEO experts have reached a basic consensus on what separates quality backlinks from the ones that underperform.

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According to the experts, the following six facets count for the most: 

1. Domain Authority

A crucial metric is something known as “domain authority.” Developed by SEO company Moz, domain authority is essentially a search engine ranking score that estimates how well-respected and authoritative a particular website appears to be in the Google rankings.

Scores range from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the healthier the site. “To calculate websites’ domain authority, Moz accounts for over 40 factors, like root domains and total number of inbound links,” marketer Clifford Chi writes.

“Websites with a large amount of high-quality inbound links, like Wikipedia, have the highest domain authority. New websites with little to no inbound links typically have a domain authority of one.”

If you hope to raise your domain authority, one of the primary items that Google likes to see are other highly authoritative websites linking back to yours. It’s on this basis that domain authority should be one of the key factors you concentrate on for lifting the quality of your backlinks. 

2. Reader-Centric Publications 

It’s not terribly difficult to find and incorporate links that plug your site into various blogs, websites, and online resources. Unfortunately, many of them won’t honestly yield much value.

Many online locations are largely designed for link building and little else, which sets a fairly firm limit on their efficacy.

You should avoid blog networks, link wheels, and similar setups.

[bctt tweet="Work only with quality publications that can boast an actual, quantifiable pool of readers who frequent them for the value of their content. " username="relevance"]

3. In-Content 

You may encounter a lot of bloggers and online journalists who will suggest they will allow you to buy or earn a link in an author byline or footer. These aren’t entirely useless, but they don’t provide much value either.

A valuable backlink should be featured in the body of the content itself. You want backlinks to be organic and contextual, not spammy and overly optimized. 

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4. Credible Site 

In addition to domain authority, website credibility plays a substantial role in the quality of a backlink. A highly credible website is going to be well optimized for security (HTTPS), attract a healthy amount of organic traffic, generate low spam scores, and have a track record for staying out of trouble (in other words, no Google penalties). 

5. Unique 

Ideally, backlinks should be unique. Repeated use of the same anchor text across an array of websites with the same type of content appears spammy to Google (because, frankly, it is).

In order to ensure your backlink strategy is effective and high returning, take the trouble to create unique links that are contextually relevant to the articles they appear in.

[bctt tweet="Natural, semantic anchor text almost always performs better than overly optimized anchors. " username="relevance"]

6. Relevant 

The relevance of a backlink plays an inherent role in the evaluation of its quality. Search engines are in the business of providing users with relevant results.

If a pool-cleaning firm includes backlinks from blogs in the automotive, nutrition, and manufacturing niches, they won’t be nearly as effective as links to blogs about landscaping and home design spaces.

“A backlink can be relevant on different levels,” SEO Mark explains. “Search engines consider the overall relevance of the linking site, the relevance of the specific page with the link on it, and the relevance of the content directly surrounding the link.”

If a backlink feels unnatural, it probably is no good. If you prioritize relevance, everything else will fall into place. 

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Establishing a Strong Link Building Strategy 

Far too many marketers get obsessed with quantity to the neglect of quality. But when it comes to backlinks, only quality really matters. You’re better off hosting 100 quality backlinks than 1,000 spammy ones.

In fact, a high volume of low-quality links will inflate your odds of getting penalized by Google. Keep that in mind as you establish or revamp your digital marketing strategy.

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