Who are the biggest sharks in the business world?
People used to joke that it was lawyers, but in 2019, the real sharks are those who live and breathe SEO tactics. We don’t mean that in a bad way – you just have to be on top of the food chain to get the rankings and results you want.
But there are thousands of SEO tactics out there and only a hundred or so of them work.
Instead of doing trial and error, check out the tactics we recommend below.
1. Transition to Video Ads
Video marketing is everything right now and will be for the foreseeable future. Not only does it get more eyes on your information, but you can expect a big SEO boost.
Google loves videos for two reasons. One, they’re easier for the customer to watch, hence, delivering high-content value.
Second, having videos on your page and as your ads reduces your bounce time. As a marketer, you know that your bounce time plays into your ranking and your site quality score, both worthwhile SEO tactics.
If your videos are done well and deliver good information, people will stay on your page longer to watch them. It’s a win for everyone!
Benefits of Video Ads for SEO Tactics
Moovly, an online video editing software, found that pages with videos embedded in them ranked higher. But not just randomly higher – they were 53 times more likely to be on the first page of Google.
You can do a lot when it comes to your SEO tactics strategy, but what can you do that increases your chances of being seen 53 times? Not much.
Finally, people are more likely to share videos. Facebook is the biggest social network, but do you know what the second is? YouTube, of all things.
Your customers are already watching videos, so invest in video ads. Then have those ads come back to a landing page with a continuation of the video on it.
Boom – clicks and SEO tricks, from just one ad strategy.
2. Do an Audit of Your Site
You can’t fix something without knowing what the problem is. And you can only figure out how to fix the problem once you’ve identified it.
To do so, you can do an audit on your site. There are companies that will do it for you, but you can do it on your own if you’re saving your budget for other things.
Here’s how to DIY an SEO Audit:
SEO Trick 1: Check your Page Descriptions
If you didn’t know, Google has what are called “spiders”. Those spiders “crawl” or “read” the content of your site. They enjoy reading short posts, rather than long crawls down your site content.
And their favorite things to read are your SEO meta titles and descriptions. This gives them easy access to the page and helps them decide what’s on it.
You can update your meta in the building part of your site, or have your web designer/IT support do it for you. It should be easy to understand like “About me” for an about me page.
Step 2: Check Your Pages for Keywords
Let’s talk about density for a minute. Not chemical density, but the density of keywords in your content. You don’t want a keyword density of more than 2%.
And 2% is on the high end. 1% or 1.5% are acceptable. That would mean that out of all the words on your page, one percent of them are your keywords.
If you do more than that, you’re now “keyword stuffing” which Google will punish you for. You can thank people who used to make blog posts for the sole purpose of mentioning their keyword 30 times in one post for that.
It’s always the people who think they’re being clever that end up ruining it for the rest of us.
Make sure you’re under 2% and stay closer to the 1% mark and you’ll be fine.
Step 3: Check Your URL
We’re not talking about the URL of your core site. Hopefully, you put a lot of thought into that when you bought your domain (and followed the rules).
We’re talking about what follows your domain name after .com. You should be able to tell 100% what the page is about from the URL.
This serves different purposes, one for SEO, and one for your clients.
For SEO tactics, this style is easy to crawl. For your clients, they can pick out your URL from a crowded Google results page.
When someone looks at their choices on Google, they see a preview of the URL. What would you rather choose if you searched “SEO tactics?
- www.site.com/six-awesome-seo-tactics
or - www.site.com/articles/blog/6SEO_tactics
The first one right? It’s more straightforward and it shows a level of professionalism. And when your competition is as high as it is in the SEO market of 2019, you need every little win you can get.
Since we want to move on, here’s a quick checklist of what your URLs should look like
- Readable
- They use hyphens instead of underscores
- It’s in your root folder
- There are target keywords
- They’re on both your mobile and regular sitemap
It’s the little things that make the difference at the end when everyone is trying to outrank you.
3. Use Infographics
As time goes on, we’re seeing more questions about the usefulness of white pages. They still serve a purpose, but it’s less impactful than it was two years ago.
Why? Because our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Someone who’s coming to your site to get the quick facts is not going to download and then read through a huge study paper.
They’re going to see that, maybe scan for a conclusion or abstract, then click away from your site.
Infographics serve almost the same purpose as a white paper, except they’re easier to read and look at. Take it from this infographic which gives us 13 reasons why our brain loves infographics.
According to this infographic about infographics (inception much?) people are 80% more likely to read something with colors, than plain text.
Which gives you an idea of the quality of graphics you need to have.
We also learn better through them. People are 323% better at following photo directions (and willing to actually use them) than they are to read a text manual.
The visual and literary format combines the way that people learn and remember things. According to our graphic, people only remember 20% of what they see. But they remember up to 80% of what they see and do.
Infographics are both see-able and readable. That means your clients have a better chance of learning the material or remembering the information on the graphic.
If you make that graphic about your company or services – you can’t beat that type of retention.
Finally, in terms of SEO tactics,f these graphics give you content. Not only can you post the full graphic, but you can use it to make more blog posts. IF you want, you could create a full blog post about every point of the graphic.
That way people can learn more and get more sources if they need to.
Plus then there’s the bounce rate. If people are 80% more likely to look at something colorful and informative, you can bet they’ll more than glance at it.
4. Learn/Live By RankBrain
RankBrain isn’t a website that ranks things against each other. Instead, it’s one of Google’s main algorithms that decide how to give you results for something that has two meanings.
Let’s say you search something like “Rihanna Cakes”. You could be searching for Rihanna themed birthday cakes, or you could be using the slang term cake, and be looking for pictures of her backside.
(PS. Did you know using strange or surprising examples makes it easier to learn? Hence why we chose the one above)
Now Google needs to figure out what to show you. Given that cakes is a slang term, it’s probably going to show you birthday cakes or photos of the celebrity eating cake.
To decide what to show you, Google does three things. First, it’ll take your past search history into consideration. If you’d just searched for “celebrity-themed birthday cakes” that’s a clue.
Second, it looks at what people usually end up clicking when they search the same term. That’s what it’s going to choose to display (combined with your individual history).
Finally, it’ll choose what pages to show based on the keywords on your site, and the “intent”. If you’re selling birthday cakes, you want to make sure somewhere you show up for “Rihanna cakes” (if that’s something you want to rank for).
But you also need to make sure you’re using and ranking for things like common misspellings of the term.
If you want a less memorable example for the word, think about searching for “Apple products”. You could be looking for things made with apples, like applesauce, but you’re probably looking for electronics.
5. Don’t Skimp on Content
Gone are the days where you could write a mere 200 or 500 words and expect max SEO benefits from them. We’re seeing a trend towards long-form content, with the sweet spot at (at least) 1,890 words.
That’s what a study from Backlinko found when it looked at one million different searches. On average, that’s how many words the top-page results had.
Yes, this is both harder and more expensive, in terms of time and if you’re paying someone to create your content. But it should be worth it if you rank higher and get more conversions/clicks.
And remember, we said at least 1,890 words. That means you should be buying/creating 2000 word posts or even longer.
Just make sure they’re easy to navigate and they’re well-formatted. You can even in-link the post, which allows people to jump to the section they’re interested in by clicking a link.
6. Rewrite and Revamp
With the high demand and short life of content, people feel like they can never come up with enough ideas. And we get that – you can only cover the same 12 things so many ways.
But you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. You can go back and reinvent old articles, or at least update them.
When you do that, you can check out the new keywords that weren’t ranking when you wrote it. If it’s an old post, it’s likely that the keywords you were targeting then have very high competition now.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t related keywords you could swap the old ones out for that are easier/cheaper to rank for.
Now you’re targeting new keywords, but if you’re also updating the page. Google will re-crawl it, and it’s almost as good as creating brand new content.
You can’t do this all the time, but you can revamp maybe one a month or a week, depending on the size of your blog.
Hire content writers to give a new twist on the same information or just switch out the keywords and some phrases. It’s up to you.
SEO Tactics
There are hundreds of SEO tactics out there. We couldn’t possibly discuss them all. Many of them are best integrated by a marketing professional, so make sure to ask your SEO strategist or marketing lead what you could improve on.
Other than the things in this article you could focus on…
- 7 – Re-linking older low-traffic pages
- 8 – Using SEO internal deep linking
- 9 – Finding your competition’s keywords and trying to steal them
- 10 – Learn Google Console
- 11 – Copy your Google Ad copy organically onto your landing page
Getting Help and Pushing Through
One of the most frustrating thing about SEO and SEO tactics, in general, is that it takes patience to see the results. Every once in a while someone will make a change and see their ranking shoot up overnight.
But for most of us, it’s an incremental change sort of thing. We can’t make you go viral (that’s up to the quality of your content) but we can give you the boost you need to get there.
Want to know how to start? Learn what we do for our customers here.
