Following the best SEO tips is what proves to be a real game changer between a mediocre to bad performing website to stealing quality traffic and rankings from your closest competitors on the 1st page.
Unsurprisingly, Google is quite fond of updating its algorithms every now and then. Over the course of 365 days, the company makes over 500 changes, most of which we aren’t even aware of.
With the SEO game becoming more and more aggressive in the race to stand out your content, it is easy to miss things.
And missing something out on an important SEO update can prove to be grave repercussions for your content.
Best SEO tips to up your organic traffic numbers
This is where we study some quick, yet best SEO tips to help you build traffic for your brand in 2020 and beyond.
Revamp existing content (especially subtopics)
The first drafts are as rough as they could be. Understandably, you’ll miss many important pointers in the piece which ins’t ready yet to help you acquire the rankings you have aimed for.
To revise your existing content, you need to inspect how are your top competitors’ pieces doing for the same keyword.
Using the Ahrefs’s Content Gap tool, here I am taking my own article on Shopify SEO guide I recently published to check the keyword I am currently not ranking for.
It looks like my article isn’t ranking for some of the above keywords as I didn’t cover those topics. For instance, one of the top ranking pages might have talked above “yoast for Shopify”, but I am not ranking for this specific term as I didn’t cover that in my content.
In other words, if I revamp my content and cover the above topic, there is a possibility I can also end up ranking for this specific keyword.
Moreover, Google might even reward my website by improving my core keyword ranking as my article will be considered more complete.
Send emails to everyone you’re linking
Backlinks does impact your rankings, but link building definitely requires an effort. Any link builder has to find interesting profiles, locate their emails, send them content, and convince them to link with your website.
Apparently, a tiresome task. But you can start by sending out emails to everyone you link to.
There are a number of tools you can avail for outreach such as Buzzstream, Mailshake, Pitchbox, etc. Do note that using any one is enough, and selecting the right one is completely down to your personal preference.
The idea is to reach out to their owners or marketing personnel and let them know about the recommendation you’re giving about their brand/tool.
Consider I am mentioning a tool in one of my articles. This is how it could go:
Hey,
I am a regular, long-time user of Mailshake and take it as an integral part in my content marketing strategy.
Wanted to inform you that I recommended your tool (xyz) in my latest post [URL], and I hope it directs some great leads to your way.
Thanks,
ABC
A caution, avoid asking for a link in the email. The purpose of the email is to connect and start a conversionary thread, rather than sounding a needy blogger asking for a backlink.
If your content is top-notch and talks about the tool in a natural manner, you’ll surely get favorable replies. In doing so, you’ll start having opportunities for article shares, guest posts linking, and other collaborations.
Insert internal links to new pages
Internal linking is done to link another website with yours. In doing so, the visitors can navigate from page to page, link authority is distributed evenly throughout the website, and the search engine uses the anchor text to understand what the page is about.
Whenever you publish a new page or blog post, it might have a less number of, or no, links at all. Hence, you need to add some link if you want it to be recognized by Google and climb the rankings ladder.
If we want to locate opportunities, we should search Google as site: yourwebsite.com “keyword”.
Consider we examine the keyword, SEO best practices, in the Neil Patel’s blog.
All the pages appearing in the results contain the “SEO best practices” keyword.
Now you can start watching the URL rating of each page and decide which pages require internal linking from the highest authority pages.
Perform an annual content audit
Content audit is a thorough diagnosis of all of your website’s pages. The purpose is to check which pages need to be updated, deleted, added, or kept untouched.
Often, content creators fall under the impression that even if a couple of years old article is ranking well on Google, it can stay as is as long as the search engine allows.
Point being, you don’t want to be left out as the need for updated content is ever so significant. And search engines favor the most recent, informative pieces, especially when it comes to competitive keywords.
There are various tools available online for content audit that’ll give you instructions on which pages need an update and which don’t. For example, Ahrefs’s free WordPress plugin.
Do note that feedback is suggestions, and not obligatory instructions. As a content creator or SEO expert, you need to assess each page on your own and decide which pages are important for your brand, even if they have little to no value in terms of search volume and clicks.
Repurpose blog content as videos
Each learner prefers his/her own learning style. Some are visual learners, while others are textual, or a blend of both.
Hence, repurposing your content in different content formats can reach a wider audience.
Consider Ahrefs blog, the platform published a piece on how to rank higher on Google, and later repurposed the blog in the form of a video.
What you need to see is which of your blog posts hold enough potential for repurposing. Apparently, picking a post already acquiring a considerable traffic is a good one.
You can embed a video of that content in the blog to attract different set of learners as well.
Moreover, you can even checkout the top videos people search on YouTube for repurposing.
From another perspective, repurposing your content pieces into videos can acquire you multiple positions in the SERPs, all due to the video carousel.
Examine top backlinks for poorly performing pieces
One of the best SEO tips, but often neglected as poorly performing pages aren’t always considered worth investing in.
From a general SEO standpoint, if you’re not ranking at the top for any particular keyword, it is likely that your competitors have more competitive backlinks. You can inspect the Ahrefs’s free SERP checker feature.
If the competitors’ pages that are outranking you have more referring domains than you, that’s the area you need to work on.
Start by locating websites that are currently linking to less worthy content. Yes, they should do much better by linking to you!
Open some top-ranked pages and look out for inaccurate, outdated content, something that you’re covering. In other words, you’re locating the loopholes in your competitors’ pieces that can be exploited to your advantage.
For instance, Moz’s list of Google Search Operators has loads of operators. However, it also misses another loads of operators such as site:, define:, cache:, etc.
After that, you’ll create a new backlink alerts in Ahrefs’ Alert—paste the competitors’ URL, set the Scope to “New Backlinks”, and eventually the alert frequency to weekly or daily.
In doing so, the alerts will inform you the links that deserve your website more than your competitor.
Fix pages with broken backlinks
Links directing back to dead pages are as good as dead themselves. They’re not ranking the pages which aren’t there, neither helping other pages rank.
Use the Ahrefs’ Site Explorer feature and the Best by Links report to filter out the 404 pages.
In other words, if there are pages with referring domains, those are broken links. Here are three ways to do this:
Reinstate
If the dead page, or backlink got broken by mistake, you can revert by directing it back to the working page.
Redirect
If the dead page is opening with a new URL, redirect the old URL to a new one. However, if the old page is on longer present, but you have a similar page on your website, redirect the old URL to that page.
Request for a link change
If someone made a mistake when linked to you, for instance, adding a particular character at the end of URL, make sure to inform them about it.
Do remember that it’s worth investing your time in fixing such issues, only if the dead pages are offering top quality backlinks. If not, leave them as 404s as is.
You can always inspect the quality of your page’s backlinks through the Backlinks report in the Ahrefs tool.
Let suppose the example from the CMOLDS blog page above.
If we see the backlink, we see that it’s actually pointless and not worthy to work for.
Fixing pages with broken backlinks might not enjoy the limelight of being in the best SEO tips. But the idea is definitely valuable from a technical perspective.
Install a caching plugin
Apparently, there are reasons why installing a caching plugin matters for your website.
- The page speed of your website improves, quite beneficial as it is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile.
- The likelihood of the bounce rate increasing is proportional to page load time (see the image below).
Although there are other factors too affecting page speed, but using a caching plugin offers a quick, effective way to turn around things for your website.
If you using a WordPress website, log in and follow the path below:
Plugins > Add new > search for “WP Super Cache” > Install > Activate Finally, navigate to the settings page and make sure the caching plugin is active.
