Essential SEO Growth Hacks — Learn to Rank your Site Faster
By Saurabh Tiwari
Staying ahead of the competition and succeeding in business on the Internet today can be quite difficult. An effective online presence will help your business reach out to new customers and clients and improve all aspects of your business, taking it to greater heights.
There are many marketing strategies that can help you promote your products and services, for example: Facebook advertising, Instagram marketing and Google Adwords.
If you want to grow your business organically, this is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to play a pivotal role in making sure that you’re visible to the public. Independent business owners need to double down on SEO if they want to stay ahead of their competitors and grow their audience.
Getting started with SEO can be difficult at first and takes time, however once your site is ranked and appears in search engines, it helps to generate organic traffic to your website, which will also produce leads and sales.
To make it easy for you I am going to talk about the top SEO Growth Hacks, so you can stick with the right methods and strengthen your SEO game.
There are more than 200 Ranking factors, according to Google’s secret Algorithm.
As Google AI is getting smarter day by day, social signals, technical SEO, https, On-Page SEO, Voice Search, Website UX, Mobile first indexing, Page Speed is becoming dominant.
“Getting started with SEO can be difficult at first and takes time, however once your site is ranked and appears in search engines, it helps to generate organic traffic to your website, which will also produce leads and sales.” #TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay
SEO Growth Hacks
Tweak your Technical SEO and on-page SEO
Page Speed
One of the most important parts of Technical SEO is page speed. Google now considers page speed as one of its main ranking factors. If a website takes more than seven seconds to load, the user is more likely to skip your website and move on to something else, so it is extremely important for you to look after your website’s loading speed.
You can check the loading speed of your website/Blog using tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix .
Responsive Design
Responsive Design refers to the responsiveness of your website to the screen that is accessing it. A website must adjust from small phone screens to large desktop screens.
When viewing your website through a mobile device, a responsive website will shrink down and realign images and text to offer a mobile view. On the other hand for a large desktop screen you will see the full website design.
To determine if your website is mobile friendly or not, take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Mobile-first indexing
Until now, Google has always indexed the desktop version of websites to determine how to rank content. That’s all changing. In 2016, Google announced they had plans to shift their algorithm to crawl the mobile versions of sites first.
How To Make Sure Your Site Is Ready For Mobile-First Indexing
Use a Mobile-Friendly Design (You can test your site using Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test tool).
Make sure your website content is similar on both desktop and mobile versions.
You need to ensure that your site loads fast in the mobile version.
Some Other Essential On-Page SEO Factors You Need to Know
Competitor Research to find SEO opportunities where competitors are lacking
The most important part of SEO is Competitor Research.
You will never be able to apply the perfect SEO hacks to your website unless you know what your competitors are doing. By doing competitor research, we simply figure out what tactics our competitors are applying, what kind of back-links they have, and what kind of keywords they are targeting, then we use that information to create an informed and targeted SEO strategy.
Doing competitor research is not as hard as it seems, as there are quite a lot of tools to help you. However, among all the tools, Ahrefs and SEMrush are the most popular SEO tools available and using both of these tools is super easy.
Let me share a guide with you:
Step 1: First of all, go to Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both of these tools are paid, so you will have to get a subscription at first before you start using them.
Step 2: Simply enter your competitor’s domain or let the tool identify your organic competitors.
Step 3: The tool will look for details about the competitor and come up with data on competitor’s search rankings, the keywords they are targeting, number of backlinks, number of referring domains and more.
Creating In-depth Content
Content is ‘King,’ and you cannot deny this fact; however, there is quite a lot of content out there that lacks quality. Here are some tips, which will help you to create in-depth content that attracts the right leads to your business.
Start With Keyword Research
One of the first steps to creating in-depth content is doing proper keyword research. If you have identified keywords, which are easy to rank for, then you will be able to improve the number of leads to your business without doing too much hard work. For keyword research, both SEMrush and Ahrefs have good keyword research tools in their toolkits.
Start With A Great Introduction
Now that you have found a great keyword to work with, start writing the article by coming up with a great introduction.
The Introduction to any content is extremely important. If your introduction does not connect with the user and has them wanting to read more about what you are discussing, the user will quickly leave your website. Write a great introduction, which hooks the visitor.
Understand the concept of user intent and choose topics accordingly, by targeting long tail versions of your main keywords.
Summarize the topic in the first two to three paragraphs. People are looking for solutions to their problems, so as directly as possible, in the first few paragraphs you must offer them a solution. This will help to catch their attention and compel them to read further.
Research and Write
The main part is writing the in-depth content that explains everything about a topic. You must research your topic well and then form your article. Check your top 10 ranked websites and look over their content. Create a structure for your content that is even better.
E-A-T Content
You will need to focus on E-A-T Content. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
E-A-T is one of the metrics used by Google’s evaluators to rank pages. The simple logic behind the metric is that high quality pages pass a high level of EAT when the low quality pages don’t. This means that you need to focus on creating high quality content.
The question is, how do you master E-A-T?
Your content must be enough to satisfy the needs of the user. For example, if they are searching for how to fix a problem, then your content must help them solve this problem. Now they won’t have to look for the solution on other websites.
Your website must have a positive reputation for its page topics.
Your website must feature all the auxiliary information like ‘About us,’ ‘Contact,’ and ‘Customer Service.’
Your website must feature supplementary content, which enhances the user’s experience on the web page.
The webpage should be maintained, edited and updated from time to time.
Content Formatting
Proper content formatting is critical. Writing content is half and formatting the content is the other half. Whenever you are posting a new article on your website, make sure to use correct content formatting.
Your content must have proper headlines (use Header tags like h1, h2, h3, etc.).
Make the content scan-able by bolding the main keywords and important parts. Break the content into small paragraphs, so the user can scroll down and scan your content easily.
Some Other Things Keep In Mind
Backlink Building
Without backlinks, it is quite tough to rank your website well. You will need to have a proper backlink building strategy for your website. There are quite a lot of strategies that you can follow to build backlinks for your website. For example, you can do a guest post on other websites and link your website using backlinks.
You can find a broken link on a website and ask that blog owner if they can replace the link with your website’s link and so on.
Some of the best link building tactics are: infographic submission, business citation sites, skyscraper and HARO technique.
Maintain backlinks by performing bookkeeping to see if the links you have made are still live or not.