Some people may still consider that SEO does not apply to eCommerce and Google will simply pick them up and bring them organic traffic.
Unfortunately, that is more than unrealistic.
Nowadays you need to invest heavily in eCommerce SEO. You have to make sure your website shows up for the right search queries, so you can have a consistent flow of potential buyers.
Furthermore, if all your competitors are optimizing their sites and you’re doing nothing, they’re going to take ALL your traffic, which could eventually put you out of business.
To help you get started, this article will do a schematic presentation of the basic elements of eCommerce SEO, from an SEO audit to keyword research, on-page SEO strategies, and simple link-building tactics.
Let’s go!
What Is E-commerce SEO & Why Does Your Store Need It?
E-commerce SEO is the process of getting your online store to show up in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
By boosting your site’s visibility in organic search results, you can ensure a consistent flow of qualified traffic to your site. This way, you can have tens, hundreds, and even thousands of interested prospects and customers coming every day, and consequently, a solid base to grow your business and increase revenue.
The 4 Pillars of E-commerce SEO
To optimize your e-commerce site correctly, you need to follow the 4 pillars of e-commerce SEO in the correct order.
First of all, you have to proceed to an SEO Audit.
SEO Audit
Why Do You Need Regular E-commerce Site Audits?
Failing to build the correct SEO foundation is like building a house without a blueprint.
Before we jump into any strategies, you need to undergo an SEO audit to make sure your e-commerce site doesn’t have any on-site problems. You should also undergo regular site audits to eliminate any new issues that arise and ensure the site is always optimized to its highest potential.
Most Common Site Problems
Some common examples of site issues are:
– Search engines have difficulties in crawling your website
– There are a lot of duplicate content
– There is very little content
– Your website has a range of technical issues like cannibalization or poor site structure
To see whether your e-commerce store has any of these common problems, you can run it through an SEO audit tool.
SEO Auditing Tools
One tool that we have found to be very useful is Screaming Frog.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that lets you analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO. You can begin downloading and crawling 500 URLs for free!
Alternatively, you can use SEMRush or Ahrefs’s onsite audit tool as well. While these tools are all-in-one complete SEO suites, their auditing feature can help you identify any site problems as well.
Keyword Research
Why Keywords Are Critical
Keyword research is the most important aspect of eCommerce on-page SEO.
Keywords bring qualified organic search traffic to your store. Get these words right and you can bring in lots of traffic and consequently revenue.
Unlike normal keyword research, there are additional factors you need to consider if you want to bring qualified buyers to your Ecommerce site.
4 Main characteristics of Your Keywords
Search Volume:
You must choose keywords that have a decent search volume.
A decent search volume can vary among different niches. There are niches where an average keyword search volume (that is considered high) will have over 10,000 monthly searches, whereas 1,000 monthly searches is a large volume for others.
The best way to find out is to take other high-traffic keywords as a benchmark.
2. Intent
You should always aim to attract qualified traffic. These are visitors coming from the right stage of the sales funnel. These are often prospects who are at the purchasing stage in their customer journey.
There may be fewer people at this stage, however, these people have high conversion rates because they are generally ready to buy.
To understand the power of intent, have a look at this example:
– If you attracted 10,000 people with a 0.5% conversion rate, whose average order value is $20, you would bring in $1,000 in revenue
– If you attracted 2,000 visitors with a 5% conversion rate, with an average order value of $20, your revenue increases to $2,000.
That’s why you need to focus on attracting qualified traffic with keywords that have the right intent. These keywords use terms like discount, free shipping, buy now, deal, coupon, etc.
3. Relevance
To attract the right audience, you also need to make sure the keywords are relevant to your ecommerce store.
To pick relevant keywords, think of what you can offer that matches the keywords. For example, if you sell men’s shorts online, a relevant keyword could be “affordable male shorts.”
You should only optimize your pages for keywords relevant to your ecommerce site.
If you’re not sure whether the keyword is relevant, you can look at the top 10 results for a keyword and see if the 10 organic positions are similar to your website.
4. Competition
Finally, you should pick keywords that you can realistically rank for.
For example, if you want to rank for the keyword “cheap headphones” you’d have to compete against Amazon, CNET and Wired. These are big sites with high levels of authority.
Instead of going up against these giants, you should attack the longer tail, lower competition search keywords first.
Keyword Research Tools
Here are 3 keyword research tools highly recommended by e-commerce SEO experts:
– Ahrefs: A top, extremely comprehensive SEO tool, leader of the market. They have the keywords explorer tool which can offer you thousands of keyword ideas.
– SEMRush: A great all-in-one SEO suite that has an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface.
– My Free Keyword Research Template: A template created to give you a complete keyword research strategy based on what is working for your competitors.
When it comes to on-page ecommerce SEO, you’ll face unique challenges you don’t often come across when you’re optimizing a regular website.
Let’s begin by looking at what on-page SEO is.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website, content, and code to help your store rank higher in the SERPs.
E-commerce On-Page SEO Checklist
Here’s a quick checklist that lists the different on-page SEO factors that impact an e-commerce site and how you can optimize them.
Title Tags: Add a target keyword in the title tag.
2. Meta Descriptions: Include additional keywords in the description to attract clicks.
3. Headings and Subheadings (H1, H2, etc.): Use heading breaks to make it easier for users to scan and consume content. Use the product name as the heading to avoid cannibalization issues.
Source: Tesco
4. Images: Optimize all filenames and add relevant alt-tags. Add LSI keywords to each alt-tag and other variations to hit as many long-tail keywords as possible. Lower the size of the pictures for faster load times.
5. Schema Data: Integrate microdata and rich snippets to stand out and draw more qualified traffic.
6. Internal Links: Add internal links via product recommendations.
eCommerce link building is similar to classic link building for any other site.
The more high-quality links you have, the more it can increase your store’s domain authority and search engine rankings. However, unlike regular websites, e-commerce stores need links that point to every section (including category and product pages.)
Below are 2 link-building strategies that can help you get started.
Competitor Analysis
Instead of spending thousands of dollars and hours formulating a link-building strategy, just steal your competitor’s strategy and replicate their process.
Here’s how to start:
Gather the first 10 organic results for a keyword you want to rank for and write down the URLs on an Excel document.
Use Ahrefs to find all the backlinks that are pointing to all your competitors.
3. Analyse every link from each competitor by sorting them by domain rating, starting with the more valuable links first.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is also another great ecommerce link building technique because it helps you:
– Build genuine relationships with industry bloggers
– Boost website exposure
To get started, you can:
Begin prospecting your industry
Source: MatthewWoodward.co.uk
After you find a list of websites (using the technique above) that are interested in guest posts, create an Excel sheet that lists all these sites.
2. Qualify your prospects:
Analyze the sites based on set qualifiers like Domain Authority (DA), Trust Flow (TF), number of referring link domains, placement of content, niche relevance, and quality of content.
3. Outreach:
Take each website on the list, find the contact information (name and email address) of the person you want to contact. Alternatively, you can use a tool like Ninja Outreach.
After connecting with the blog manager, create an article outline for approval.
4. Create content:
Once your article is approved, focus on creating in-depth amazing content.
5. Build relationships with bloggers and webmasters:
Continue this process to build strong relationships and expand your online network.
If you want to learn more about other simple link-building strategies, make sure you read E-commerce SEO: The Ultimate Guide.
Conclusion
Investing in eCommerce SEO will be one of the best things you can do for your business.
Not only can you generate a consistent flow of potential buyers, but it will make a profound impact and change your business forever.
You can start by building a solid foundation for your Ecommerce store with an SEO audit.
And then work on keyword research, optimize your on-page SEO, and engage in link-building strategies.
What are you waiting for?
Get started today with SEO for e-commerce to build future wealth.
Invited guest writer:
Matthew Woodward is an award-winning blogger who publishes detailed case studies and tutorials in the internet marketing and SEO niche. He started his blog in 2012 and has been able to assist thousands of online businesses to achieve great results. You may reach him via his Youtube channel, LinkedIn or Facebook.
The Google Search Console is a set of tools that website owners should familiarize themselves with if they want to be highly successful. It’s designed specifically to help track your website’s performance.
The term ‘Google Search Console’ might not ring any bells for you, but you still might already have some idea of what it is because it was once known as Google Webmaster Tools or GWT for short.
This system has been around for a while as a way for everyone from app developers to online business owners to Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) to keep on top of how well their site is performing and what they can improve.
In 2015, GWT changed its name to Google Search Console because it became clear that it was a valuable service for a larger audience than just webmasters and its popularity has basically skyrocketed since then.
The service is free and allows people to check out massive amounts of data concerning their website such as how many people are visiting, what kind of demographics are attracted and the channels used to reach the site, the keywords that the respective site ranks for, etc.
This information is extremely important because it offers the base to optimize the content to better suit the type of visitors attracted. Do that and they’re more than likely to keep coming and their number to increase.
You can also see what pieces of content are most popular, so you can focus more on that type of topics or type of content and not waste valuable time and effort on content that isn’t actually getting the job done.
Source: Youtube
Sounds like a great service, right? So, let’s take a look at how to use Google Search Console and how you would make these tools work in your favour:
Your Website Verification
The first thing that you need to do is make an account and then get your site verified, so the Console can access the data needed to generate useful reports for you.
This is a relatively straightforward process. When you get to the homepage, the option to enter a URL under the tab ‘Domain’ will be right in front of your eyes. Enter the link of your website’s homepage.
If you have a https website include it in the URL that you are making the account for. It has to be the exact URL, in order for GSC to be able to find it and subsequently verify it.
There are several different methods through which you can verify a site and you will see them listed after you’ve entered your URL. The first option and the one that’s recommended by GSC is the HTML file method.
This one is as simple as downloading the HTML file that the Console provides and then uploading it to your site. You must leave the file there after verification if you want the site to remain verified.
You can also verify using your Google Analytics account if you have one, a Google Tag Manager account or through the Domain Name Provider.
So, now let’s take a look at some of the main features that Console has and how you can take profit of them. When you select status on your site’s page you’ll be able to access a number of other subheadings and we’ll talk about them individually now:
Performance
There’s a number of different metrics through which GSC will help you gauge the overall performance and the traffic that your website is getting. When you click the Performance tab, you’ll see four main sections.
The first displays the Total Clicks section. Here you’ll be able to see the total number of clicks that your website has gotten after showing up in search results on Google. Through this you can get a sense of how your site stands among similar ones.
This is influenced quite a bit by the position your site occupies on the results page. It’s relevant information to keep an eye on how your site is moving up in search results.
The next section is entitled Total Impressions. It is more specific. And will show you how well your site ranks for the main keywords. So, you will see a number after each keyword your site ranks for and this is the number of times your site shows up for that keyword.
Then there is the Average CTR. CTR stands for Click Through Rate and it refers to how many viewers have clicked through to your site after seeing it in the search results. Obviously, this provides information if your site pops up in the Google’s search results for the main keywords you need your site to rank for.
The fourth section under this subheading is Average Position. Here you have to select a period of time and you can observe which was the average ranking position of your site for a specific keyword during the chosen period.
Source: YouTube
Index Coverage
The Index Coverage tab keeps track of how many pages from your site are stored in Google’s Index. And concerning the ones that aren’t indexed, this tab will indicate which are the issues preventing them from indexing.
Index Coverage page is frequently updated with notifications when Google finds new problems that impede them to index your site properly. Most of the times it happens because there’s an error on page or a broken code or something of that nature.
Here you can visualize insights regarding such errors, details that allows you to understand them better and what caused them and solutions on how to fix them.
You’ll be given a list of URLs which are not showing up in the index and once you’ve addressed the reason why they’re not showing up you can then mark said URL as fixed so that it can be tested by Google again and hopefully indexed.
AMP
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The goal behind the AMP service is to make your web pages fast and easily accessible on every device. It’s not just about being easily accessible on phones or tablets.
AMP will ensure that your site reacts well and has an appealing look both on laptop and desktop screens. A site benefiting from this service has increased chances to get more repeated clicks.
GSC has the ability to keep an eye on AMP pages for you and check whether or not there are any errors or anything that’s preventing your pages from being as fast and attractive as AMP are expected to be.
Being able to track, analyze and make ensure your site is user-friendly is of paramount importance for each site owner.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a really useful feature to have. As the name suggests, it’s a map that shows all important and relevant pages on your site and how you can access them. You should create one for your site to enable Google to identify all your content.
Once you’ve made the sitemap, you just need to add it to GSC. There will be a bar under the respective tab named ‘Create new site map’ and here you just insert your site’s URL and Google shouldn’t struggle to find anything it needs.
Job Postings
Not everyone is interested in this particular section of their GSC because not everybody will be using their site to post job listings. But GSC will be able to track how well these postings are doing and if you need to alter anything to improve their performance.
Again, this isn’t something that GSC is really known for, but if you are running a small business and you are actively hiring, this is a very useful feature, previewed with elements like collaboration tools and invoice generators.
Links
On the links section of the Console, you can see how many backlinks your site gained from other related sites. You will also be able to check the number of links that are coming from a specific site if there are more than one.
You can see if there are anchor texts which are commonly used to link to your site, and you can then utilize these anchor texts to your advantage when working on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your site.
The Google Search Console is a truly useful service and there’s plenty more for you to explore and discover when you’ve got yours up and running. The amount of services offered here are numerous and there are new improvements and add-ons scheduled all the time.
We haven’t covered things like Mobile Usability and Manual Actions nor have we discussed the drawbacks of the service because there are a couple of these also. But overall, it’s well worth it and you will observe the benefits when you’ll be an active user of the Google Search Console.
That SEO is paramount for ranking in search engines and driving more traffic to your site, is not a secret for a long time now. The two main areas of SEO are on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Test the best-considered off-page SEO techniques in 2023 to push up your content in search engine results.
The present article will focus on off-page SEO techniques and methods. First of all, let’s clarify what is off-page SEO: simply put all the techniques executed externally, outside your site, to boost rankings. Off-page SEO tools and tactics impact the position your site gains in SERPs and include brand awareness, links, and external site relationships.
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Here are the best off-page Search Engine Optimization techniques valid for 2020:
Off-Page SEO Strategy: Obtain Backlinks from Authority Sites
Most SEO experts agree that in terms of off-page SEO optimization, backlinking is the most prominent. Backlinks are impacting heavily on your rankings particularly if you want to appear on the first page of search results.
Reason?
Search engines like Google will trust you just after many others will trust you. If sites with high authority will link back to your site, Google will consider your site more trustworthy.
These backlinks are very important in the algorithm used by Google to rank pages in a list of results for a certain query. This algorithm uses a series of criteria baptized by Google Ranking Factors, which counts about 200 factors that are taken into consideration when deciding the hierarchy of sites when answering a search query.
Some of the most impactful are:
The more links from authority sites point to your site, the more value you gain in Google’s eyes. As it analyzes several aspects concerning the link: from which site comes the link? Which is its quality? Which is the logic of this connection? How fresh is it? Etc.
Ok, we get the importance of backlinks, especially from renowned sites. But, the $1million question is:
How do you obtain these authoritative, relevant links?
Here are some ways:
Off-Page SEO Techniques: Guest posting
Guest blogging is a reliable way to attract new links and traffic, even if some might consider it outdated. While contributing to other sites besides building links, you promote your brand building authority and acquiring referral traffic.
When posting on other sites, take into consideration the following:
* Make a list of sites that accept guest posts, that are connected with your niche, and that you are interested in publishing on.
* To cover all opportunities, search in Google and on social media networks with “your target keyword” + ”guest post”
* Check each site from your list and verify which is most popular, and which has the highest traffic, and prioritize them in the function of the results you obtain. Use a tool like similarweb.com, to help you.
* Use a social media analyzer to verify the number of social media shares the latest posts from the respective site had. This will help you establish the potential shares your articles may achieve.
* Remember not to insert too many links to your site.
This method involves a lot of homework, that’s obvious: you need to research your niche, find out which are the influencers and top bloggers, get in contact, and send pitches. But, if your request is accepted, your article will be published and voila, you obtained a valued backlink.
Off-Page SEO Techniques: Create high-impact infographics
That human beings are visual creatures in general, is demonstrated and proved with numbers. We all, are more attracted by visually appealing content – “an image makes more than 1000 words” and statistics show this.
In this category, infographics are still at the top, even if they saw fulminant growth in recent years and some may consider this practice arrived at saturation. Great results for backlinks and traffic can still be achieved if great graphics, information, and original idea are used.
To help promote your infographics you should consider publishing them on infographics submission sites and link them to your blog or site.
Infographics have a high potential of going viral if properly made and intensively promoted. When your infographic is shared, organic traffic is directed toward your site. So, you made it, backlinks are generated.
Off-Page SEO Techniques: Broken link building
A more efficient method to acquire links may be identifying broken links on authority sites and getting in contact to acknowledge this, offering in exchange a link of yours to replace it.
Broken links are all over the Internet, and authoritative sites are no exception. This arrives because initial links change, hosting expires, or links are damaged during migration processes. Having broken links on your site does not impact ranking, but affects user experience and you want to avoid that. Authoritative sites are aware of that too, and that’s why this technique is relevant and works.
Thus, make a backlink analysis on relevant sites for your niche, identify broken links, contact the owner and inform him about those dead links and propose a replacement link, preferably yours. Chances are that your effort is paid back with a backlink.
Off-Page SEO Strategy 2: Leverage Your Social Media
Off-Page optimization finds a massive pillar on social shares. Check below how this happens.
Social Media supports off-page SEO. Source: postano.com
Using social media helps you meet your target audience, know her better, and find out which are her pain points, where is she hanging out, and when.
Off-Page SEO Techniques: Increase Engagement on Social Media
Engaging on social media platforms is a primary Off-page SEO technique that will have a major impact on your site’s visibility and popularity. Being present and involved in social conversations on multiple platforms will expand your reach and help grow your business.
Off-Page SEO Strategy 3: Leverage Question and Answer Sites
Another way to boost your site visibility through off-page SEO techniques is to use question-and-answer sites like Quora.
Search and join questions associated with your business or niche and provide pertinent answers to these questions. Offer a link to your website to help you gain visibility.
Some specialists consider that if you don’t use Quora, for example, you do not use the full potential and you are missing points on your SEO efforts. Quora is a platform where you can obtain pertinent answers to any question you may have.
For brand awareness, link building, or for a certain marketing campaign, Quora is a not to be missed place.
Now!
How can Quora as an off-page SEO tactic serve your purposes? Note some advantages:
– Allows you to prove your expertise: Answers you provide on Quora should relate to your business and reveal your expertise in the mentioned area. If you gain readers’ trust they will turn to you with further questions they might have.
– Answers appear in Google results: If people upvote your answer, it will display in Google as an answer to the respective question.
– Boosts your traffic: Your answers can generate traffic in the long run.
– Enhances your knowledge: You can find out and learn tips and tricks for your business from other experts.
Off-Page SEO Strategy 4: Create Video Content
You may wonder what’s the connection. What has video content to do with off-page SEO? Well, video search engines like YouTube, can drive massive traffic, in fact, YouTube is the 2nd ranked search engine after Google. So, links obtained via videos published on YouTube are valuable for your off-page optimization and drive traffic to your site.
Video content is the next megastar of marketing, do you know that 54% of users are interested in seeing more content? And 51,9% of marketers consider the video has the best ROI among all types of content. Not to mention that YouTube can bring high earnings if the needed effort is input.
When publishing video content, aim for high quality, aim for differentiation how are you distinct from others, and what makes you unique. Gaining awareness on YouTube takes time, up to two years so be patient and consequent.
Off-Page SEO Strategy 5: Network with Experts and Influencers in Your Niche
Building relationships with other bloggers in your industry, prominent authors, and influencers is another great way to support your off-page optimization efforts and create brand awareness. Linking with professionals in the same vertical will increase your credibility in front of readers and search engines alike.
Collaborating with niche authors to create and exchange content and interviews gives you the possibility to have access to new high-quality content assets and to new audiences. Entertaining relationships and collaborations with experts in your area allow you to access a particular market segment and new opportunities for partnerships.
Off-Page SEO Strategy 6: Pay Attention to Google Penalties
We already established that backlinks are extremely important for your site ranking. Hence in some cases, backlinks may have a negative influence.
Source: Moz
That’s why is compulsory to stay away from Google penalties because recovering takes time, money, and effort, and besides that is a very difficult process.
Nowadays Google aims for valuable content and high-quality user experience. The focus is not directed anymore to the words people use for a search, but to the scope, they use those words.
There is no established procedure that guarantees you are out of the penalties radar, but there are some actions you can take to avoid such issues:
· Analyze and audit your site. Use a tool like SEMrush to identify and solve SEO-related problems.
· Create valuable and useful content for your readers. Put your users first and write for them, and insert images, videos, graphics, and data in your posts. Provide value and a great user experience for your audience.
· Apply different anchor texts. After performing your backlinks audit and identifying the sources of your links, you should consider diversifying your keyword phrases. This is a way to show Google your links are natural. So, use various keywords, brand names, and generic words as anchor text. Make sure your anchor texts are relevant to your topic and related to the referring page. Consider using your brand name as an anchor as often as possible.
Search engine optimization is not a sprint, is a marathon. Endeavors made today for optimization will fructify step by step in the future, in a compound effect. To see results from off-page SEO takes time and constant improvement efforts.
Most bloggers or site owners dream about having their blog/site appear in the first position of search engine results, or most often Google’s first page. When I hear affirmations like these “I have a two months blog and I want to get on the first page of Google” most often it makes me laugh. It’s not a secret that the results displayed by search engines have behind a complex algorithm that includes in the case of Google, more than 200 factors. How to get on the first page of Google is a tough question with a complicated answer.
A new site has insignificant chances, if not second to none, to hit the first page or the first position in the first page. One great impediment is the domain authority – if in your niche the influencers or large companies have thousands or tens of thousands of backlinks and high domain authority your chances to overrank them are literally zero.
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This blog has about 27 posts and is ten months old, at the moment of writing this article. I would still call it small and rather new. Most often I publish twice a month, 2000+ articles. In these conditions ranking on the first page of Google didn’t even cross my mind. In the digital marketing niche, there are large companies and prominent bloggers with large sites and thousands of backlinks to their domain. So, there is no real possibility to reach Google’s first page very quickly. Or so, I thought.
But surprise!
While verifying analytics I noticed lately that one post has constantly a higher number of visitors compared with my other blogs. I thought it was weird as the respective blog is among my less shared articles and if I were to make a top ten of my posts, I wouldn’t count this one.
When making the following search on Google I had a huge surprise:
My post “Twitter Best Practices for Business” ranks the first on Google SERPs. On Google US and on Google France. It also appears on the first page for other related keywords.
Say, whattttttttt?
I thought I need a new pair of glasses.
How comes?!
A blog having a MOZ DA 9 and no backlinks outranks pages having MOZ DA 72, 100, 94. Moreover, a no-name blog outranks Twitter’s for business section concerning the topic Twitter for business. Rather funny, I would say.
How did this happen?
Let’s inspect a bit what I did with this post and how is possible to repeat this exploit.
My first suspicion is that RankBrain has a heavy word on this. Or at least at this moment, I do not see other better explanations. Might be that it’s simply happening. But it lasts for a couple of months…
So, what I did, how I got on Google’s first page for free? I used on-page SEO best practices to optimize my post.
Included the Target Keyword in the Title “Twitter Best Practices”
Most part of experts estimates that the title is the primary on-page SEO factor and gets the pole position as importance. I totally agree. Also having the keywords as the first words of the title has importance in SERP rankings.
We all use keywords to search, and the results returned by engines contain those keywords and the title is the first in line. If the title contains the words you used in your search most likely you will click on that link if you suspect you might find there the answer you are looking for.
I would say in SERPs it’s more about the probability of getting the information you need than how engaging or catchy is the title. Leave aside each of us has his/her definition on what’s engaging or not. What one considers engaging one other will not.
So, a title like “Twitter best practices for business” has more chances to appear on search results than a fancier title like “How to crave your way to a highly engaging Twitter account”, for the simple reasons it will most probably not cross your mind very often to use those words for research. This type of title will see higher success on social media than in SERPs.
When you are interested to find which are the best practices for Twitter you will use these words most probably “Twitter best practices”. Not trying to be creative and see how well Google performs. You will type strait the words you consider have the best chances to return the information you need.
Rules for high performing titles in SERPs:
– Keep the number of characters of the title under 60, to avoid getting it cut in search results
– Insert the keyword in the title – that’s compulsory
– Place the keyword first, if possible.
The title of the article we are talking about includes 2 modifiers “2018” and “best”, confirming the theory that modifiers tend to improve rankings. So, use modifiers “best”, “2018”, “guide”.
Assigned H1 Tag to the Title of the Article
Nothing new here, the H1 tag is of utmost importance for SEO, thus check if your CMS assigns properly H1 to the title of your article. H1 tag includes the target keyword and appears just once on every page.
Defining what quality content means is a firing debate with no strait answer. Nowadays unique content, ranging anywhere from 1000 words to several thousand – left aside the quality of information – is considered high quality, in depth content. Various researches indicate longer content as ranking better.
A precondition of high-quality content is to be skimmable, easy to read, and aesthetic as design. Stress for short paragraphs, use bullet points, subheadings, and bold keywords to attract attention to them.
“Twitter best practices for business in 2018” respects these requirements also.
Inserted Catchy Visuals to Improve the Appearance of the Post
Formatting your post for readability matters. Make use of charts, screenshots as examples, videos, gifs, appealing images to retain reader’s attention, increase dwelling time and diminish bouncing rate.
As we are visual human beings we are all more attracted by visual content, so including visuals is a must to gain reader’s attention, to make your post more attractive and shareable. And search engines have a preference for high quality visuals, too.
Optimized Images – an Absolute Must for Google Ranking
These are of course details, but the “devil is in the detail”, hence images need to have proper descriptive names, alt texts and the alt texts to include keywords. A little something that helps search engines establish the topic of your post in their algorithm. So, give them a hand and do yourself a favor.
Also, I noticed that my articles that have some sort of infographic rank better. “Twitter Best Practices for business in 2018” has a checklist as infographic.
The First 100 Words Contain the Target Keyword
Again, to help search engines correctly identify the subject of your post, include the target keyword at the beginning of the first 100 words.
Also, keywords should appear in your article where appropriate, and in the end, there is no one-fits-all formula for this, just keep the right balance. Using too many keywords and overstuffing your content might be subject of Google penalties, consequently, refrain from this practice.
Used Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords are synonyms or related words taken into consideration by search engines to decide on the relevance of a page. Use part of them in your post.
Subheadings Marked as H2 Tags
All subheadings in the article are H2. But there is no subheading H2 having the keyword included. I missed this one.
Recent Content
Search engines prefer fresh content – normally I would say. You, as a reader, are not very interested in consuming outdated content. Updating periodically your content is decisive, particularly updating content that is time sensitive.
Google shows the last update of an article, so this is relevant detail. When you update your older posts, make these modifications significant – add more details, remove parts that are less relevant – not just change a word or two here and there, Google will remark it. To enhance your rankings, update frequently your posts.
Made Sure to Relate to Reliable External Sources
Having outbound links is a simple way to generate traffic. They improve the quality of your article and that of the provided information and serve supplementary clues to search engines to establish the subject of the respective post.
If you want your audience to trust you and gain more credibility in front of search engines pay attention to outbound links. Select just high authoritative and reliable sources. Peak world-renowned publications like Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Huffington Post, etc, and quote influencers and experts in your industry. For the marketing area citing sources like HubSpot, MOZ, Content Marketing Institute, Backlinko, Neil Patel, etc is recommended, as they create high quality trusted content that your visitors will highly appreciate.
Included Also Internal Links to Other Pages on My Site
Inbound links need to be considered too, as interlinking is relevant strategy to retain more time the user on your site. It’s a pretext to make the linked pages recrawled by search engines and you raise the quality of the post by providing supplementary details.
Be sure to have about 3-4 links to your other posts and choose as anchor text relevant keywords. Place them only when pertinent and when they enhance the value of the provided information and avoid stuffing the post with 20 inbound links.
Inserted Social Sharing Buttons
Social sharing is not considered a ranking factor, but it helps indirectly, as it supports extending your reach. As you may notice there are social buttons on the left side of my post, Sumo is responsible for them and their personalized design.
URL Is SEO Friendly
There is no secret that the first 3-5 words that form an URL impact heavier on the search results.
As consequence, the permalinks should be relevant, as short as possible, and comprise the target keyword.
The loading speed of the sites is counted as an SEO ranking factor and a must-use on-page SEO technique. User experience depends highly on the loading speed of the site. Experts say that users would not return to a site that loads slow, and aim for a loading speed of under 2 seconds.
“Make sure they [web pages] load fast, for your users. I aim for less than 2-3 secs” John Mueller, Google”
Marketingdigibook tested for speed. Source: HubSpot Website Grader
In summary, this is all I did for this page in terms of SEO and for the moment it is ranking on first position in Google search. For more insights on how to rank higher on Google in 2018 and eventually how to get your business to show up on Google first page, listen to an expert:
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