We live in a technology-driven world, one in which there are many ways to analyze and improve your SEO efforts to grow your business. Successful marketers today use multiple SEO tools to enhance their website's search engine rankings.
By implementing the best SEO tactics using the most effective technologies, they increase their likelihood of getting organic search traffic. If you want to achieve a similar outcome for your brand, you need to take a holistic look at your website. The following tips and tools will help you get to the next level.
How to Improve SEO
Let's go over some of the best strategies to make the most of your SEO efforts, along with the tools you'll need to implement them.
Generate Great Secondary Keywords With Semrush's Keyword Magic Tool
Understanding what keywords you should target for your audience is a crucial part of your content strategy. Researching keywords for each piece of content you write helps you in two ways:
- You can develop a better outline for your piece
- You get a sense of what your prospects want to read
Great SEO writing happens when you demonstrate a balance between keywords and your prospects' everyday language. To achieve this balance, you don't just need the primary keywords, but also secondary keywords.
Secondary keywords are the terms semantically related to your primary keyword. Secondary keywords, along with your primary keywords, add context to your content and help search engines better understand the information on your page.
When it comes to finding great secondary keywords, the Semrush Keyword Magic tool can fill the gap. It gives you the ability to look up secondary keywords when you type in the primary keyword.
By using this tool, you will also be able to see how closely related a secondary keyword is to the primary keyword, along with its search volume to assess whether it is worth covering in your content.
Based on this information, you can select 4-5 relevant secondary terms to include naturally in your content. These keywords should be such that they support your content and work together with primary keywords to satisfy user intent.
On top of that, you can use this tool to view the questions related to your primary keyword. These are the keywords that start with terms like who, where, what, when, how, and why. By making sure that you're answering these questions in your content, you can further boost your SEO.
Track Unlinked Mentions With Google Alerts
Getting more and more high-quality backlinks is another important factor to improve your SEO and market your product. And a great way to earn some easy backlinks to your website is by finding unlinked brand mentions. These are the web pages that have mentioned your brand name, but haven't linked to your website.
To track unlinked mentions of your business, you can set up a Google Alert for your business name.
Google Alerts is an application that allows you to track the pages on the web that mention the keywords you set. Whenever a page mentions the term you set the alert for, you will get an email notification about the same.
So if you set up a Google Alert for your brand name, you can easily track your brand mentions. To set an alert, the first step is to type in the term for which you want to be alerted.
Next, configure the following parameters:
- How Often: This is your preferred frequency of getting alerts
- Sources: The types of websites you want to track
- Search Language: The language of websites to check for brand mentions
- Research Region: Use this if you want to limit monitoring to a certain region
- How Many: The number of results you want to get for each notification
- Deliver To: The email address to which the notifications will be sent.
Click Create Alert and you're all set. Now, when a new page is published online and it mentions your brand, you will get to know. You can then contact the admin of this page and request them to add a hyperlink pointing to your website.
Get Quoted As An Expert Source With HARO
Another easy method to build new backlinks is to provide expert quotes to journalists and bloggers through a tool called HARO ( Help A Reporter Out).
HARO is a popular service for journalists to get quotes from experts. It gives you opportunities to getting quoted in the press as an authority on a subject, leading to more exposure to your brand. In addition, the reporter who quoted you gets to make their story more credible with expert inputs, creating a win-win scenario for all the parties involved.
Once you sign up on HARO as a source, you'll able to select your areas of expertise. And you'll start receiving daily emails with requests from reporters who are looking for expert opinions for their upcoming stories.
For example, if you select the Business & Finance category, you'll get requests on topics such as marketing, accounting, finance, and more.
Each request includes the query, submission deadline, email address to respond to, and any additional requirements that the expert needs to fulfill.
Now, all you need to do is pick the queries which are most suited to your areas of expertise and start responding to them to the best of your ability.
Once you find a query you can respond to, make sure you read and follow all the directions to the letter. The journalists who post these queries get hundreds of submissions. So you need to make yours stand out.
When answering a query, say something really insightful, unique, and substantial from your personal experience that others might have missed. The more interesting your answer, the higher the odds of your response being selected.
When a journalist chooses to feature your quote in his story, you'll get a backlink credit from the website where the story gets published.
Check Keyword Optimization With Clearscope
As you write content for your business, ensuring that each piece is optimized for your target keywords is crucial for SEO improvement.
A tool like Clearscope can make it really easy to better optimize your content and insert the most suitable keywords into it.
It's an AI-based tool that allows you to see how your content compares to the top 10 Google search results for a given keyword, and provides recommendations for terms to include in your content.
Once you run a report for a given keyword, you'll see a Grade Summary box that scores your content against the top 10 and top 11-30 competitors for that particular keyword.
You'll also see a Relevant Terms tab, which shows you the most important words and phrases you must try to cover in your content.
For each term, you get some really valuable insights, such as:
- Heading Presence: How often did a competitor use this term in a heading or subheading?
- Typical Uses: How many times the term was typically used in the top-ranking pieces of content?
- Importance: How important it is to use this term in your content?
As search engines get better at understanding user intent and providing the most relevant content, a tool like Clearscope can help you be more relevant and cover all the subtopics that the high-ranking pages have included in their content.
On top of that, it helps you streamline your on-page SEO process and make the most of each piece of content. For this reason, Clearscope is now an integral part of top marketing agencies and brands.
In Feb 2014, Google was granted a patent associated with using website performance as a search ranking factor. In addition, Google representatives have openly spoken about the importance of website speed time and again.
The company's focus on loading times is also evident in several of its initiatives, such as Google DNS, Google Fiber, Google Hosted Libraries, AMP, PageSpeed Tools, and more.
That's not all. A report by Google and Deloitte states that improving your mobile load time, even just by 0.1s can increase conversion rates. On the other hand, a slow-loading website leads to a high bounce rate.
Image Source: Website Builder Expert
So ensuring a high-speed website is not just about user experience, but also about better business results.
If you want to check whether your website has a good loading speed, you can use an online tool such as Pingdom for free. It enables you to test your website's performance from multiple locations around the world.
When you run your website URL through Pingdom, you'll get reporting on metrics like performance grade, total page size, total load time, and the number of requests it took to load your website.
Based on the performance grade of your website, you can then decide to take steps to reduce your loading time. For example, here are some common tips and tools to improve page speed:
Optimize Image Sizes: If you are a WordPress user, you can use a plugin such as ShortPixel. It automatically compresses the images you upload without sacrificing quality.
Enable Caching: Many reputable web hosts already provide this feature, especially in their managed hosting packages. But if that's not the case with yours, a plugin such as W3 Total Cache can help you enable caching on your website.
Ensure A Responsive Site With Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
With the recent rise in mobile and tablet devices, more and more searches are being conducted on smartphones. In fact, most retailers who target the younger demographic get a vast majority of their traffic from mobile devices.
With so much traction from mobile devices, it's no surprise that Google focuses on mobile as the future. This is also evident from its recent shift to mobile-first indexing.
So what does this mean for you? It's not optional anymore to have a mobile-friendly website. If your primary focus right now is the desktop version of your site, then it's time to take the mobile version more seriously.
To check whether your website is responsive, you use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool. It allows you to type in a website's URL and see if users can easily access and navigate the website on mobile devices.
It checks for issues such as:
- Flash: Most mobile web browsers don't support Flash. So if a website is using Flash, users will not be able to view the whole website.
- Viewport Issues: If the viewport is not adjusting to the screen size or uses a fixed-width layout, it won't show properly on mobile phones.
- Horizontal Scrolling: This does not make sense for mobile devices. That's why Vertical scrolling has become the new standard.
- Content Not Scaling: Mobile sites shouldn't be exactly like the desktop version. Instead, the content should be smaller and it should adjust to the screen size.
The test gives you a score, along with suggestions for making your site mobile-responsive. By implementing these suggestions, you can capture more traffic and increase conversions from smartphones and tablets.
Start Business Blogging With WordPress CMS Tool
Blogging is one of the best ways to build your business and boost SEO. It doesn't just help you get more organic search traffic, but is also very effective for lead generation and conversions.
A blog is an extension of your website where you can regularly write fresh content on topics that resonate with your target audience.
When people search for more information on topics related to your industry, a blog can help them find content that you create related to those topics. As a result, you drive more traffic, and give your visitors a reason to stay longer on your website.
The more blog posts you write, the more pages your website will have, and the more chances you'll get to rank in search engines.
In fact, once you have established a big group of loyal readers and subscribers of your blog, you'll have multiple strong and stable search engine rankings. In other words, you'll be set to get all the traffic you need for the long term.
When it comes to starting a blog, WordPress by far is the most popular blog creation and management software available today. It's easy to use and can be downloaded and installed for free.
Moreover, with thousands of themes and plugins, it gives you unlimited ways to customize the appearance and features of your blog.
Starting a WordPress blog involves getting a domain name and hosting, followed by installing WordPress and customizing the blog as per your requirements.
Write Catchy Titles With The Headline Analyzer Tool
A headline is arguably the most important component of your content. It's the first thing people see when browsing search results for a keyword. And it determines if they will click on the search result to read your content.
When it comes to writing headlines for SEO, below are the most important aspects you should keep in mind.
Headline Length: Your title should be less than 65 characters, otherwise it will get cut off in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Use Primary Keyword: Your title should have the primary keyword that you're targeting for the page, ideally near the beginning.
Highlight The Benefit: Emphasize the promise you're making with the readers, and make sure your content follows through on that promise.
Invoke An Emotion: The best titles trigger an emotion inside the readers and make the content irresistible.
The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer tool can help ensure that your headline is ticking all these boxes, and helps you improve even more aspects like word count, sentiment, word balance, and clarity.
Crafting the perfect titles may take more time, but it's time well spent. Polish each headline to the best you can and you will surely see the difference in your SEO efforts.
Has this ever happened to you? You search for something in Google, click on the #1 result, and find a really poor piece of content that did not give you the information you needed. So you ask yourself, "How is this ranking number 1?"
Well, you're not alone. And the good news is these types of situations are opportunities. The article which ranks #1 is there because it was able to get several high-quality backlinks. And if that poor or outdated piece of content has somehow managed to have so many backlinks, imagine what you can do with a high-quality, up-to-date piece of content.
If you have content on your website which is better than the #1 ranking articles for certain keywords, all you need to do is find these high-ranking articles, and get the people who are linking to these articles to link to you instead.
To find low-quality, outdated pages which are ranking high in Google, go to the Ahrefs' Content Explorer and type in one of your target keywords. Next, it's time to set a few filters:
- You want to find pages with lots of backlinks. So set the Referring domains filter to 50+
- You also want to make sure the pages you find are outdated. So set the Date filter to 5 years and older
- Quality is not just about the word count, but poor articles are usually very short and less thorough. So set the Word count filter to less than 1000 words
Once you get the results, check each item one by one to find an article for which you have a great replacement on your website or blog. When you find that content, you can click the caret and select the backlinks option to see all the backlinks pointing to the page.
All the websites linking to the mediocre page are now your backlink prospects. So you can find email addresses of people who manage the content on those websites and pitch your high-quality article as a replacement.
Updating your old articles is one of the best strategies to improve your SEO. In fact, a study by Orbit Media found that more and more bloggers are focusing on updating their old blog posts.
Image Source: Orbit Media
The study further showed that bloggers that update their previous content are 20% more likely to get the most out of their content marketing.
However, if you have hundreds of articles on your website, you cannot update them all at once. Your resources are limited, and therefore, you'll need to prioritize the articles which will give you the most return on your update efforts in the shortest possible time. That's where Animalz Revive can help.
Animalz Revive allows you to find outdated content on your website that requires an update. It analyzes your Google Analytics data and shows you exactly which pages on your website need improvement.
Moreover, one of the best features of this tool is a metric called Traffic Loss Since Peak. It helps you understand exactly how much traffic a piece of outdated content is costing you.
With the help of these insights, you can find the most important pages on your website that you need to update first. So you can see the results of your SEO improvement efforts as fast as possible.
Conclusion
While improving SEO may seem daunting at first, many of these methods can be implemented in just a few days.
By using these tools to create content, audit your website, and plan your strategy, you will soon be yards ahead of your competitors. Moreover, you'll get your products and services in front of more and more prospects.